Kat Richardson - Possession

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.

I reeled back a few steps.

“Turn on the recorder!” Stymak yelled.

“I can’t see it! You turn it on!” I shouted back, swiping thick, sticky oil paint off my face and hoping nothing else was winging my way while I was temporarily blind. You wouldn’t think oil and pigment would sting so much. . . .

I could hear Stymak and Goss scrambling around me to get to the table where the digital recorder lay. An alarm was going off from one of the machines monitoring Julianne’s bodily functions. I held still in spite of an urge to help—which in my state would be no help at all; I didn’t want to blunder into the machines by mistake and I could feel the paint starting to burn my eye. I really needed to get to the sink without falling into anyone’s path or crashing into anything vital, but I couldn’t find the bathroom without aid. I cursed my inability to get out of my own damned way, much less get a look at what was happening to Julianne Goss. I squeezed my eyes closed and took a deep breath, shutting out the distractions in the room as I sank into the Grey.