Possession (2 page)

I got a cup of water for her rather than coffee, since I figured that although she looked exhausted, she didn’t need to be any further wound up. She clutched the cup in both hands, her shoulders hunched. Her skin had a sallow cast over its natural lightly bronzed color, and blue shadows of worry smeared her eye sockets. She peered at me like a frightened cat from under a bed.

I sat down and started the conversation since it seemed like she wasn’t ready to. I did my best to give the impression I was earnest, honest, and safe to talk to. “I’m Harper Blaine and I am a friend of Phoebe’s. I’m also a private investigator and I help people with problems. What’s your name and what can I help you with?”

“I—my name is Lillian Goss,” she said. “Lily. Phoebe says . . .” Her gaze darted around, looking up at me, then down, then side to side in nervous jumps. “She says you see ghosts.”

I was a little surprised: Phoebe hadn’t seemed entirely convinced when we’d had “the talk” about my weird abilities and the grief that they had caused her in the past. Of course, she might have still been mad at me; it was hard to tell precisely what Phoebe was thinking when she was displeased. “Do
you
believe in ghosts?” I asked.

“I don’t. Or I didn’t. Or—I don’t know. But I believe in God and I believe in the Devil and I believe that whatever has my sister isn’t either one of those.”

I blinked, but I didn’t balk. “‘Has’? I’m not sure I understand. Something . . . that isn’t God or the Devil has . . . taken your sister? Is your sister missing?”

“No. Or yes. She’s . . . not home anymore. But someone else is.”

“Someone else is in your sister’s house?”

“Not her house—her body.”

“You’re talking about possession.”

“Yes.”

I felt . . . well, the British would say “gobsmacked,” but I wasn’t sure that was quite right, either. I just sat still and tried to get my brain around it.

She watched me absorb the idea and took my well-schooled poker face as rejection. She looked at the floor, her hands squeezing the cup so hard that the plastic sides deformed with a popping sound that made her start and gasp. “You don’t believe me!”

“Yes, I do. But why have you come to the conclusion that someone or something other than her own self is occupying her body? That’s quite a leap for most people. In fact, most people wouldn’t even consider that it might be the action of demons or the Devil. . . .”

“It’s not the Devil! God—
my
God—wouldn’t let that happen! He doesn’t just—just throw people away. He is loving and forgiving and Julie loves him just as I do. He wouldn’t—”

I stretched my hand out toward her, placating. “Ms. Goss, it wasn’t my intention to offend you. I’m only surprised. Please tell me what makes you think some entity has control of her body.”

She bit her lip, clamping down on sobbing breaths. She wheezed and snorted for a moment before she regained some control and was able to speak. “My sister is in what they call a persistent vegetative state—a PVS. She’s not really awake, even when she has her eyes open and seems to be looking around. She breathes on her own and sometimes she laughs or cries, but the doctors and nurses tell me it’s not real joy or sadness, just an involuntary function of whatever’s still working in her brain. She can’t do anything but lie in bed or sit in an armchair. The doctors say if her state doesn’t change soon, it never will; she’ll just deteriorate slowly until she dies.

“But a while ago she sat up on her own and she started drawing or painting something on her bedspread—”

“With what?” I asked. “With her fingers?”

“Yes, at first. I thought she was getting better, but that’s not it. She just paints. She doesn’t improve. The machines indicate that she’s not doing anything—that her brain isn’t sending these signals that move her body—but she’s sitting up and painting. I started bringing her brushes and supplies so she wouldn’t use food or blood on the bed. . . . Now she just sits up at random times and paints. And then she lies down and whatever spark she had in her goes away again. The machines say she never did anything. Her blood pressure and breathing go up, but that’s all. But these paintings . . . they’re real paintings—not crazy smeary things.”

“Is it the paintings themselves that distress you?”

“No. She paints landscapes but they’re . . . they’re odd. Someplace you almost know but can’t name. She paints them—it’s not a hoax or a prank. But it’s not her . . . it’s not her doing it.” Goss gulped a sob and tried to drink from the crushed cup, getting water down the front of her blouse for her pains.

I took the cup from her hand and fetched her a new one along with some paper towels to mop up the mess. Flustered, she patted at herself, looking embarrassed and finally hiding behind her cup of water for a few sips. Once she’d settled down again, I encouraged her to continue her tale.

“You’ve seen her do this?” I asked. “The painting.”

“Yes. She lives with me now—if you can call what she’s doing ‘living.’ I sit with her all the time. Night and day. Everything is falling apart, but I don’t know what else to do. Nurses come twice a day to help me, but she doesn’t move or do anything unless she’s painting. There are so many machines . . . but they all just beep quietly away as if she’s only lying there like always. And now it’s getting worse.”

“In what way?”

“She paints all the time, so many hours, and not all the same kind of paintings anymore. Now it’s like there’s more than one person painting. Even when she should be sleeping, she sits up and paints. If I take the brush away from her, she just grabs something else—or uses her fingers—and goes back to painting. Some of the nurses don’t want to come anymore—it freaks them out to be with her. The doctor said I was imagining things, until she started doing it in the exam room. Now even he’s spooked. And all the time she’s doing it, it’s as if her arm is moving without the rest of her doing anything. She’ll move her head around, open and close her eyes, laugh, cry . . . wet herself . . . and keep on painting. It’s like
she
isn’t the one painting at all. It’s just her body being moved around by someone else. Like a puppet.”

“Does she finish the paintings?”

“Not always. But she paints faster now, like she’s racing—or whoever is inside her is rushing to finish before they have to leave again. If she doesn’t finish one the same day she starts it, she’ll never finish it at all. She just goes on to the next painting. Sometimes she’ll do three in a day.”

“I think I need to meet your sister.”

Lily Goss’s face seemed to flower with hope. “Then, you’ll help me? You’ll find out who or what is possessing Julianne?”

I had to shake my head. “I can’t guarantee that. I don’t know what’s happening to your sister or if it’s really in my purview. There are some things I can’t do anything about. If this really is some kind of possession, then you need to talk to your priest.”

She gaped and looked on the verge of crying, her aura turning a bleak, muddy green that seemed to drip downward like rain. “No . . . I already talked to Father Nybeck! He can’t help me! It’s outside his role or something. He said he can’t help me . . . won’t. Don’t—don’t say you won’t, either. Please.”

She crushed the second plastic cup, sending a gout of water into her lap. She jumped up with a sob and I think she would have bolted if I hadn’t caught her shoulders and steadied her. She felt like a bundle of dry twigs barely held together by her rumpled clothes, and I was too conscious that I loomed over her, but there was little I could do to make myself smaller. I braced her and held her still, saying, “Miss Goss, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I said I might not be able to.”

She looked back up at me, her lip trembling and her jaw twitching as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t remember the words.

“It’s all right. I’m not saying no. I’m saying let’s go see.”

“Right now?”

“If you’re comfortable with it, sure.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I live just up the street and we can walk it in a few minutes.”

I convinced her to ride with me in the Land Rover—I didn’t want to have to walk back to the bookstore later in the chancy weather we’d been having.

Fremont has a lot of condos these days, but there are still plenty of single-family dwellings on the narrow streets of Seattle’s former homegrown Haight-Ashbury. Lily Goss lived in a freestanding house that was tall and narrow and very, very modern with a lot of steel, glass, and bright red exterior panels mixed with sections of horizontal wood strips that sported big black bolts holding them to the structure’s surface. Somehow neither the wood nor the red panels made the house look warm; it just looked expensive.

The interior was stark and seemed empty—as if things were missing. I glanced quickly at the entry and the living room as we passed through them. Goss caught me at it as she stopped in front of a tall wall of frosted glass and steel. “My ex-husband took half of the furniture and I had to sell the remaining art,” she said.

Part of the frosted wall slid aside, revealing a surprisingly large elevator. “So, you’re divorced,” I said, following her into the glass-and-chrome box.

Goss heaved a sigh and looked embarrassed, pushing the top button of four on the control panel. “Yes. The church frowns on it, but they don’t prohibit it anymore and I . . . I’m glad Teddy left. He didn’t have a generous nature and he wouldn’t have coped well with my sister living here, dependent on us for everything.”

“How long have you been on your own?”

“A little over a year. I hadn’t been . . . alone for very long before Julianne got sick.”

The elevator came to a smooth, quiet stop and we stepped out onto a wide, wood-floored landing at the top of a staircase, with three doors facing us. Goss stood still for a moment and I could hear a susurrous, mechanical mumble coming quietly from our left. Grey mist boiled out from under the double doors on that side.

“I had the master bedroom converted for Julianne. I wasn’t sleeping in it anyway.”

She opened the door that leaked ghost-stuff and showed me in.

I could tell it had been a sumptuous suite originally, but it now more resembled a hospital room. The thick white carpet was covered with heavy, flexible plastic like the material used for floor protectors under office desks. The primrose yellow walls on two sides were almost hidden behind various pieces of medical equipment and monitors. All that remained of the original furniture were a white table—stained with paint and spilled brush cleaner—and a couple of yellow armchairs, one of which was pulled up next to the hospital-style bed near the far wall. A bed table with art supplies and a stretched white canvas standing on a small easel had been placed nearby. A stocky middle-aged woman in nurse’s scrubs and practical shoes occupied the chair, but she jumped up when we came in.

“It’s all right, Eva,” Lily Goss said, waving her back. “Sit down. If Julie doesn’t need anything, you might as well rest.” Goss looked at me. “This is one of Julianne’s nurses, Eva Wrothen. She was kind enough to come early today so I could go out for a while. And that is Richard Stymak. He’s a medium.”

I turned my head to look down the table at the man who had just come out of what I guessed was the bathroom. He was a burly, bearded guy with a geeky air to him, wavy red-blond hair brushing his collar, and a T-shirt with a logo I couldn’t identify peeping out from under his unbuttoned dress shirt.

He raised a hand in a token wave, seeming a bit embarrassed to have shown evidence of bodily functions—as if those who commune with spirits don’t do that sort of thing. “Hi. Um . . . I’ve been monitoring and recording Julianne’s activities for Lily and trying to contact whoever or whatever is doing this.”

“Any luck?” I asked, hearing Wrothen snort in derision behind me.

“Depends on how you define that. Lots of ghosts around, but they aren’t talking to me.” Then he drew an excited breath and perked up, staring over my shoulder toward the bed. “Oh! She’s up!”

“No, she’s not,” the nurse snapped, looking at the monitors and making rapid notes on an electronic clipboard. “Her blood pressure is up, and she’s upright, but she’s not awake.”

“I didn’t say she was awake,” Stymak objected.

Ignoring the argument, Goss rushed toward the bed and I followed her.

The patient—sickeningly thin, her dark hair hanging limp around her head—was sitting rigidly upright in the bed and staring straight ahead as her left hand groped across the bedspread for something.

Goss snatched a flat paintbrush from a jar on the nearby table and put it next to her sister’s seeking hand. Julianne grabbed it, but nothing else in her body or face seemed to react. I could see the silvery mist of the Grey coiling around her in a thick, moving mass. A clutter of shadows pushed and boiled near the bed, then began to draw aside as the patient started painting on the bedspread.

Goss pushed the table with the easel over to the bed and into place in front of Julianne, who transferred the brush to the canvas. The patient daubed at the canvas with the empty brush for a moment before she swung her arm suddenly to swirl it in paint from the art supply table. She moved no more of her body than her arm, not turning or looking at what she was doing. Then she went back to the canvas, painting with rapid movements.

I drew closer, peering at her. Her aura hadn’t changed since I’d entered the room, but something opaque and dark now hung over her left arm and side, wrapping around her back. Her half-open eyes were focused not on the canvas or the supplies near her, but slightly upward and far away. Her mouth was slack. Goss and Wrothen stood on either side of the head of the bed while I moved closer and then past the foot of the bed, more interested in watching Julianne than seeing what she was painting. Stymak was somewhere behind and to my right, but I didn’t spare any attention for him.

The unconscious woman hit me in the face with the paintbrush. No one really expects a vegetative patient to flip a brush loaded with sage green paint into their eye from six feet away, but I suppose I should have seen it coming—I’m a ghost magnet. I wasn’t sure who or what might be in charge of Julianne Goss’s body at the moment, but it seemed to have a juvenile sense of humor; right after the paint came the babbling.