Kat Richardson - Possession

When I reached the Goss house and Lily had escorted me back up to the former master bedroom, I saw that, once again, Julianne was painting. Lily left me to go and sit by her side. She seemed to have as little interest in Stymak and me as Julianne did at that moment. Stymak was doing something with his digital recorder at the white table again and no nurse was in evidence. I’d been left momentarily alone just inside the room’s double doors. I took the chance to look the room over, since there seemed to be no threat of flying blobs at the moment, and see what I’d missed the first time.

I started with Julianne’s latest painting on the easel—a rough cliff with some kind of low, rambling building along the top. The strokes were soft and yet precise, in spite of the speed with which they were being made. I almost recognized the place, but not quite. It didn’t look like a modern location; it looked more like something old and almost forgotten. I turned aside and surveyed the next piece, which was leaning against the wall nearby: a huge, rugged mountain of sharp sandstone-colored bluffs and smoky shadows rearing up against a lowering charcoal sky—draped in soft white scarves of cloud—from a foggy forest of tiny pines that clustered at its foot like anxious pets. My breath caught in my throat as I studied it. I didn’t exactly recognize this scene, either, but for a different reason—this one didn’t seem to be a real place so much as one that recalled real Washington places; it was strange and familiar and powerful, glistening with paint still wet a day later and the threads of some passing ghost form that had caught and lingered in the moisture. I turned slowly around to look at the other paintings in the room—most hung on the walls around the main doors and leading toward the bathroom, others just leaned against the wall. Dozens of paintings.

They were not the same. Some shared a similar style, but the rest varied as widely as an art school exhibition. There were some with strong colors and blocky forms; others were almost photo-realistic in their detail, picked out in clear shafts of sunlight and minuscule brushwork. Still others were more like sketches, lines of color roughly brushed to create just a shape or suggestion of a scene. This could not be the work of a single person—certainly not a bedridden, nonresponsive woman with the muscle tone of a limp towel. And over and over, the same scenes: the cliff, the mountain, a long beach of rock-strewn sand bordered by soaring pines in shades of green and gray marching up steep slopes to higher ground.

And all around the bed pressed a susurrant surge of spirits, like flotsam circling round and round the center of a maelstrom, drawn to the way out but unable to escape. I’d seen ghosts pulled to an object before, but I’d never seen this sort of expression. If I stared very hard, making my injured eye water, I could perceive among the dark shapes and writhing scribbles of energy individual ghosts reaching toward Julianne, or bending down to whisper into her ears and being swept aside again as the next moved closer. They kept circling, whispering, reaching. . . .

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said.

“Automatic painting,” Stymak said. “Like automatic writing. The spirit is channeled through the subject’s body and produces the work independent of the channel’s abilities, often while they are unconscious or in a trance state. Though I’ve never heard of anything on this scale.”

His voice jarred me out of my staring and I turned to him, letting my gaze pull back toward normal, though the Grey vision lingered, shading the room in silver and smoke. “Nor have I, though I do know what automatic painting is, Stymak—but you knew that, since you say you talk to ghosts.”

Stymak glanced away for a moment before he looked straight into my eyes. “I don’t quite hear the dead—I certainly don’t talk to them. I feel them, really. I can’t say I see them so much as I experience their presence. They whisper to me and I know they’re here.”

“You can get information from ghosts that aren’t in your immediate area?” I had a rusty memory of being told that mediums somehow talked to ghosts in the Grey in such a way that they didn’t have to be in the same literal space, unlike me.

Stymak nodded. “They compelled me here a few weeks ago and I met Lily and I saw Julianne and I knew the ghosts were here, that they are trying to tell us something through Julianne, but I can’t understand what it is they’re trying to communicate this time.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head. “It’s too loud. It’s like . . . there are a hundred people in a tiny room, all shouting different things at the same time. They press in and they recede again like a furious tide, but I can’t sort them out. It’s like trying to catch a fistful of seawater and separate a single molecule of salt. It’s an allegory, but it’s real. I can’t make it any more clear than that. Not to myself, and probably not to you, either. But you know what I mean. They indicate you do.”

“They? The ghosts?” I cast a glance back at them, clustering around the bed, but they didn’t seem to pay us any attention.

“Well, the ones that can hold a thought together at least. Your identity is like a thin, clear current in the river of their babble. It was hard to pick out at first, but I finally got it and when I got here and experienced the turmoil around Julianne, I thought I should mention you to Lily.”

“ You mentioned me to Lily? She said she heard about me through Phoebe Mason.”

“The owner of Old Possum’s?” Stymak asked. “Yes. See, I didn’t have your name or know where to find you. I only knew who you were to the ghosts. They knew that you and Lily both knew this bookstore owner—”

“Phoebe.”

Stymak nodded. “All right: Phoebe. They let me know the connection, so I told Lily to ask Phoebe about you. And that’s how it works for me—strings of connections and associations and ideas, but not anything as easy as a voice saying ‘Hey, stupid, go talk to this lady at this address.’ Ghosts are kind of slippery and obscure most of the time, but I’ve learned how to be patient and put it together. Sort of decode them, I guess you could say.”

“But you haven’t decoded what’s going on with Julianne.”

“Oh, I have. But I don’t know why , or what they’re trying to tell us . ”

“Have they let you know there are others?”

“Others like Julianne? Unconscious channels? I’m not sure. . . . The information I’ve been gifted with is confusing at best and . . . very noisy.”

“I’m given to believe it’s true. Can you confirm it with your ghosts?”

“Can’t you?”

“I haven’t tried yet.”

“You haven’t tried,” Stymak echoed, incredulous and staring as if he’d never seen so odd a fish as me. “What sort of medium are you? I mean, I don’t have a choice about hearing them. They’re in my head, like pieces of my own mind. I can’t not try because I don’t try to begin with.”

I had experienced the inability to tune out Grey voices for a while and it had nearly driven me insane, but I’d died again and the phenomenon had ceased—I was grateful for that, especially since the voices I’d heard had been part of the Grey itself, not just ghosts. “I’m not a medium,” I said, shivering at the idea of going through that all the time. “I’m more of a . . . fixer. I work out problems between the normal and the paranormal.” Stymak nodded while frowning as if he wasn’t sure he saw the distinction. “My contact with the paranormal is less mental and more physical than yours,” I explained, but I had the impression he didn’t understand that any better.