The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [150]
Chapter Nineteen
You know that Emily has doubts that the dead from 1611 have attached themselves to you, but she has convinced herself that because you believe this is the case, perhaps Reseda’s little New Age ritual (and, in her mind, there is nothing sillier than a little New Age ritual) will help you. In her opinion, it can’t possibly make your mental illness any worse. You, however, have absolutely no doubts that you are—to use Reseda’s word—possessed. And, because you have faith in Reseda, you agree to the depossession, confident that this is indeed more than a little New Age ritual, in terms of both the likelihood of its effectiveness and the upheaval it will cause in your soul. Your (and this is a new word for you in this context) aura. Reseda has made the depossession sound troubling for a great many reasons, but largely because she has warned you that while under hypnosis you may relive the crash.
“Can we make the outcome a little more promising?” you ask, hoping to lighten the moment, but she answers that the end will be every bit as terrifying.
“I was never terrified,” you correct her.
“Then you won’t be now,” she says. “Your passengers, however, might be. The outcome will be the same, because it’s all you know of the experience and it’s all they know of the experience. It’s what happened.”
“How long will I be hypnotized?”
“Until everyone inside you has left.”
Emily rubs at her upper arms as if she is cold. “And there’s no danger?” she asks again.
“The spirits represent a danger to others while they have access to your husband—and they may represent a danger to him. But I think the element of the actual depossession that is most dangerous will be the effect on your husband of experiencing the crash once again. But he says he’ll be fine,” Reseda explains, and then she turns her gaze upon you, gauging your reaction. You shrug. Yes, you’ll be fine.
And so tonight when the girls are asleep you will go to Reseda’s. There, in the midst of the statuary and the plants in her greenhouse, a small world where, she insists, she is strongest and most persuasive, she will attempt to drive out the dead. Or, as she puts it, drive them home. It may all be over in an hour, but it may also take all night. When the Santa Fe shaman performed the depossession on her, liberating her twin sister, it had taken no more than forty-five minutes (though at the time, Reseda says, it felt as if it were taking all night). Twice before when Reseda herself has performed depossessions, once on a firefighter who was saddled with the dead from a house fire—an angry teen boy and his father, a man who had placed the very space heater in his son’s bedroom that would cause the electrical blaze—and once on Holly, who was coping with the dead from a car accident she had witnessed, it had taken hours. Reseda suggested this was because there had been multiple spirits trying to cohabit with the living. But she will take whatever time is needed.
“Is this an exorcism?” Emily asks as she walks the woman to the front door of your house.
“I don’t believe so,” Reseda replies.
“You don’t believe so?” Emily says, unable or unwilling to mask the bewilderment in her voice.
But Reseda merely shakes her head. “An exorcism would suggest that your husband has been possessed by demons. I’m not sure I believe in demons.” Then she smiles ever so slightly and adds, “I try not ever to be too sure of anything.”
As she speaks, you feel the throbbing in your head and understand that, at the very least, Ethan is listening. Perhaps Sandra and Ashley are, too. You have the distinct sense that Ethan is not going to leave quietly. He may not be a demon in any literal sense, but having to watch his daughter’s unquenchable loneliness in the purgatory he shares with her—a three-story Victorian to most of the living—has turned his anger to madness and made him by any definition more than a little demonic.
Emily put down the book she was reading—staring distractedly at words, she thought, because she was assimilating nothing