The Video Watcher

by Shawn Curtis Stibbards

  “You a friend of Maria’s?”

  I said that I was.

  A vehicle splashed by slowly on the street behind me. Someone inside the house was playing U2’s “One.” The woman leaned out the door and stared at the dark sky.

  “Has it stopped raining?”

  “Yes.”

  “Almost feels like fall.”

  “Yeah.”

  She hollered inside again, “Maria.”

  “Hey, where are you going?” she said. “She’s coming.”

  But my right foot was already on the edge of the top step. “I forgot something. My car, it’s parked in front of a fire hydrant. I’ll be back in a sec.”

  3:43 A.M.

  “These possessions… how do they occur?”

  “They can occur in a whole number of ways. They—”

  “Can… Sorry. Go on.”

  “They can occur in a whole number of ways,” said the guest. He was soft spoken, with a light, Irish accent. “But one precondition in about ninety percent of the exorcisms I’ve been involved in is loneliness. The demon approaches the person when they are alone and cut off from people. And then once the person is possessed the demon, or demons—quite often there is more than one—they will keep that person alone.”

  “So they get you alone, and they keep you alone.”

  “Exactly.”

  “For those of you who have just tuned in, I am speaking to Caleb Collins, a retired priest and exorcist, and we’re talking about demon possession in general, and in particular, the case of Mitchell Schrader, the elderly man whose decapitated body was found in his scooter in a field in Wisconsin. So, Father, you were saying earlier that you think whoever did this to Mitchell Schrader was demon possessed.”

  “It’s very likely …”

  I lowered the volume and turned on my back. I had closed the drapes because outside was a full moon. Above me the ceiling’s exposed wood beams looked shadowy in the green light of the stereo’s dial, and I imagined what it would be like if they came down on me.

  I was in my room packing, getting ready for the trip to Harrison when the doorbell rang.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Me—Cam.”

  I was a bit surprised when I opened the door. Cam stepped in. He looked somehow bigger than the last time I’d seen him. His hair and leather jacket were wet.

  “Sorry I didn’t call first. I was afraid they were listening.”

  “Who?”

  He panted. “I’ll tell you in a sec. Do you have a towel?”

  When I returned with the towel, Cam had taken off his Adidas runners and was coming toward me.

  He snatched the towel and wiped his head. In my room I sat at the desk. He got up on the bed opposite and leaned against the wall.

  The desk light was on. His face, I remember, looked tired and haggard in the light.

  “Put some music on.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t care. Just put something on.”

  That week I’d been getting ready for my move back to UBC, but my old stereo was still hooked up. I dug through the CDs strewn on the floor. I intended to play Zeppelin I or Aerosmith’s Pump, but found Appetite for Destruction, and put it on.

  Seconds of silence. Slash’s delayed riff.

  Cam grinned as the drums and bass guitar entered.

  As Axl Rose muttered something about God, I’m sure Cam and I were thinking of the same memory: the bus ride to outdoor school in Grade 11 when Cam first heard the album on Damien’s Walkman.

  “Do you want something to drink?” I said.

  “What do you have?”

  “Beer?”

  “Yeah.”

  I got two large bottles of Becks—the 710ml ones—and as we sat in my room drinking them, Cam told me what he came here to tell me. None of it surprised me.

  Two weeks before he’d had an altercation with the homestay parents of the Brazilian girl. When he went to visit her, the homestay parents wouldn’t let him see her. They accused him of calling the house ten or twelve times a day, and at two and three in the morning.

  “That wasn’t me,” Cam told me, “that was that fucker in Brazil, her old boyfriend.”

  They’d told him that the girl was scared of him. When Cam tried to enter the house, the homestay father stopped him and the police were called. But Cam wouldn’t leave, and they took him down to the station, and now he had some sort of restraining order.

  “That’s how you’re going to help me,” Cam said, his tone already suggesting it was something that I wouldn’t be agreeable to.

  “The police think the girl went back to Brazil. But she didn’t. She’s still in Vancouver.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we tricked them. I knew that they wouldn’t let me out when she was still here. So I told her to pretend to go home.”

  “When did you tell her that?”

  “When I was in the jail. I wrote her a letter telling her to tell them that she was going home and then wait for me to contact her.”

  “Did she write back?”

  “I told her not to. It was too dangerous. I told her to wait for me to contact her.”

  “How do you know she got the letter?”

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “I wrote two letters. The first one was in English and I gave it to this ‘counsellor’ to give to her. But the counsellor opened it and refused to give it to her. So the second one I wrote completely in Portuguese and gave it to my sister to give her friend. I’m sure that that one got through because no one ever mentioned it and the police believed me when I said that I hadn’t tried to contact her anymore.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “First I want you to go to her friend’s homestay house and give her friend a letter I have. Then I want you to go to the Cambie next Friday and give the girl a letter.”

  “How do you know she’s going to be there?”

  “The letter you’re going to give the friend is going to tell her to be there.”

  “Why do I have to give it to her? Can’t you do it?”

  He let out an exasperated sigh. “I told you—the restraining order. I cannot contact the girl.”

  “Even the friend?”

  “Even the friend.”

  I asked him if this was a good idea.

  “Why? Why isn’t it a good idea?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “They’re not going to catch me. Trust me. The girl and I have a special bond.”

  I remained silent.

  “No one’s going to catch me.”

  When I still didn’t answer, he said, “No one can stop me.”

  When Cam and I got outside it was night. The rain had stopped. The night air was cold. A long white gleam stretched down the road from the light at the end of the cul-de-sac. The faint roar of water going over the dam half a mile up the canyon came from the distance.

  My canvas shoes were soaking by the time I got to the car. Cam started the engine and the wipers cleared the beads of water from the windshield. Condensation rushed across the glass, then slowly receded.

  I thought about why I was doing this.

  Nothing he had said could possibly be true—Cam could not write Portuguese, his sister had not given the letter to the girl, the girl was not still in Vancouver, the government was not looking for him.

  But he was alone with these thoughts, and I knew what it was like to be alone with one’s thoughts.

  “Have you talked to Damien?”

  “Yeah, last week.”

  “He’s not doing well?”

  I laughed. “He thinks someone’s trying to kill him at the hospital.”

  “Tell him next time you talk to him that
I like him. That I don’t hold anything against him.”

  “Sure.” I said.

  As he said these things the Beemer careened around one blind corner after another, heading toward the turn off to Edgemont. The road ran along the eastern edge of the canyon, and across it the lights of West Van houses hung in the drenched darkness.

  Cam turned on the stereo and Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing in the Name” throbbed from the back speakers. When we got to Edgemont Village the streets were deserted, the street lights shone eerily and a neon sign saying “Drugs” glowed on the Pharmasave’s roof.

  “You know what my sister said to me tonight?” Cam said, turning down the stereo’s volume.

  My eyes were fixed to the sign. “What?”

  “She asked if I was taking my medication.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My baby sister!”

  I waited for him to say more, to elaborate. But again, except for the clacking of the dry wipers, the car was silent.

  When we reached Grand Boulevard, my nerves were bad. I tried to swallow, I tried to take only large breaths.

  Cam turned down a side street and coasted past a one-storey stucco bungalow where the front light was on. “That’s the house,” he said, pointing.

  Two more houses down he pulled to the curb. Leaning across me he took a sealed white envelope from the glove compartment.

  “What if she’s not there?”

  He bit his bottom lip, hard.

  “You don’t want me to give it to them, the homestay parents?”

  “No,” he said.

  My wet shoes squished on the wet pavement as I walked back to the girl’s house. Waiting for someone to come to the door, I noticed I’d squeezed the envelope too tightly. I tried to straighten it. There was still no response after a minute and I peered through the panel of frosted glass to the side of the door and saw in the distance a diffused patch of light. A blurred shadow moved across it. Footsteps came. The glass grew dark. The lock clicked, the door squeaked on its hinges.

  The woman looking at me was squat and shapeless.

  “Is Adriana home?”

  She continued studying me. There were prints of windmills on the dress, and her face had been scarred by acne. “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Um, Richard,” I said. It was the first name that came to mind, and I remember that it almost made me laugh.

  “I’m afraid she’s out at the moment.”

  I asked if she knew when Adriana might return.

  “It should be soon. Is there something I can give her?”

  “Uh—”

  “Or maybe you can come back later?”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s better.”

  I was at least at the end of the driveway before I heard the door close.

  “Well—what happened?” Cam asked when I got in the car.

  “She wasn’t home.”

  “Did you leave the letter?”

  “Did you want me to?”

  He looked at his watch. “Who was there?”

  “The homestay mother, I guess… I told her my name was ‘Richard.’”

  “Richard.” Cam laughed, and I laughed. I guess he and I both found the name funny. “How did she act?”

  “I think she was suspicious. Do you want to wait?”

  “We can catch her even before she gets to the house.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The rain began again, drop by drop stippling the windshield. The drops ran together. Through the streaked glass, the road distorted and blurred. At one point Cam turned the wipers on, the radio blasting out the middle of “Semi-Charmed Life.”

  He turned off the motor and it was again silent, except for the steadily loudening sound of the rain on the vinyl roof.

  “What if she called the cops?” I finally said.

  “Do you think she did?”

  “She was suspicious.”

  The sound of the rain grew louder, almost sizzling.

  “Fuck!”

  We both laughed. I guess he and I were thinking the same thing—how it’d appear to the police if they found two men sitting outside a female student’s homestay house at ten o’clock at night in a dark car.

  “We’re fucked up.”

  “Yeah—we’re fucked,” I said. We laughed again.

  “All I want to do is talk to her.”

  But to pay just to talk to someone…

  “It looks bad,” I said.

  Cam now really began to laugh.

  “I think we’d better go,” he said.

  “Otherside” blared on as the motor turned over. Cam shifted into first and pulled away from the curb.

  As he drove me back up Grand Boulevard toward the entrance to the freeway, I thought that I should feel better, that I should feel relieved that nothing had happened.

  The street lights glided by overhead, one after another, lurid and faint. When we reached the on-ramp to the highway, I heard myself say, “Go back.”

  Cam turned, he kept turning, he did a U-turn and started to drive back down Grand Boulevard.

  “Are we going back?” I asked him.

  “We’ve got to, right?”

  I tried to speak.

  “Right?” he shouted.

  I grasped the door handle and pushed myself back in the seat. “Yeah.”

  Three minutes later I was in front of the house again. Cam had parked beside a tall, dark hedge a block away. Giving me the letter, he’d said, “Tell her not to open it. It’s private.”

  “Sure,” I’d said, knowing that I wasn’t going to say anything so suspicious.

  The house looked warm and dry. To anyone seeing me standing there—a soaking wet man in the middle of the road at night—I must have looked insane, like one of those maniacs in the slasher films waiting outside the teenage girl’s house.

  The letter tucked under my arm, I again walked up the driveway and climbed the chipped cement steps and rang the doorbell. I wiped the dripping bangs from my eyes. There was a siren far off and I thought the woman might have called the police. I got ready to run. The siren grew louder, then faded into the sound of the downpour.

  Blurred shadows were moving behind the frosted glass. They became larger, and more focused.

  I tried to make my hair neat, I tried to look friendly.

  The lock clicked. The door was pulled back.

  The same woman.

  “I’m sorry to bother you again,” I began.

  This time she was more nervous. “That’s—okay,” she said.

  “Is Adriana now home?”

  “No, she isn’t. But I’m sure she’ll be here any moment. You’re wet. Do you want to come in and wait?” Down the hall behind her, a man sat at the table in the kitchen watching.

  “Um. No. I better go. But can I leave this for her?”

  The woman took the crumpled letter.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” the woman said.

  Trying not to rush but rushing, I stepped down the cement stairs and walked up the driveway, then down the dark street toward the car.

  When I was sure I was out of the view of the house, I ran.

  6

  Kris came out of the washroom, her hair wrapped in a bath towel. “Don’t just stand there. Be useful.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  She glared at me. “Do I have to tell you? There’s luggage to be loaded.”

  “Is it ready?” I asked.

  Kris only looked at me and shook her head. She turned and went back into the washroom.

  A travel bag and a suitcase stood by the door in the front hall. I tried to pick up both. The suitcase was too heavy so I took the bag out first.

 
The clear weather that morning made me feel better. The previous night I hadn’t really slept. I would wake up every hour or so with a shaking feeling deep inside. At one point I turned on the light and looked at my hands, hoping to see physical proof that something was wrong with me.

  There was an autumn coldness in the morning air, and as I walked back to the house, I realized that I was looking forward to my return to UBC in a week’s time—the crisp mornings with steam rising off the pool at the Aquatic Centre, the men in Plant Operation uniforms clearing the lawns with their leaf blowers, the fresh girls in their tank tops and shorts.

  When I stepped inside the house, Kris was waiting. “You didn’t see my travel bag, the one with the fish logo on it?”

  “I—” I looked outside.

  “Go get it! I need it!” she shouted.

  “You said—”

  “I said ‘suitcases.’ Not ‘bag.’ And take this one when you go. I suppose I have to tell you that.”

  Kris remained silent for the first forty minutes of the drive. I slouched back in the passenger seat with my knees pressed against the dashboard. I tried to avoid any thoughts of the “vacation.” This yearly family reunion at Harrison had been fun during the time when my grandparents had gone. But since they stopped going, and it was only Becky and Kris, it had become tension-filled, a sort of morbid reenactment of the previous years’ situations and conflicts. The only thing I was looking forward to was seeing my cousin Emily. The previous summer was the first time that she’d been old enough to hang out with, and we had played pinball in the games room, working together by telling each other which target to shoot for, and had ended up getting the highest score.

  I was still thinking about this when Kris said, “Did you happen to see the weather forecast?”

  “No.”

  “I thought they said we were going to have sun.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  Far ahead in the blue distance, rising above the silvery grey cloud, was the dome of Mount Baker.

  Four more miles passed in silence. Then Kris said, “How’s your friend doing?”

  “Which one?” I asked, but already suspecting which one she was interested in.