Possession Read Online Free PDF Page A

maybe in her late forties—a mousy, matronly
woman. She had a kind expression on her face.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Hillary Harrington.”
    Harrington.
That’s a name I remember the doctor calling out in my dream, when I was
floating above the room.
    I decided to test my theory and asked, “Were you
there when they gave me the electroshock treatment?”
    “I was.” She patted my arm. “You seem to be doing
so much better now.”
    It wasn’t a dream. I thought I’d imagined the
whole thing—the room, the people in blue—but she was one of those
people. I remembered her name. She was here, she was real, and she’d been there
during the procedure. The floating, the feeling of being tugged down, of
falling… Did it all really happen? I’d heard stories of people who had died and
left their bodies. Maybe that happened to me.
    “Did I die during the procedure?”
    She pulled out a fresh gown from one of the
drawers and laid it across the bed next to me. “What? No, no, of course you
didn’t. You were perfectly fine before the doctor put you under. You know, it’s
not like the old days when patients undergoing shock treatment had convulsions
so severe they sometimes broke bones. Now they give you muscle relaxants and
something to paralyze your movement. It’s much safer.”
    “Your body doesn’t move at all?”
    She started helping me out of the gown and into
the new one.
    “You’re completely still—well, except for
your left foot. They need a way to see if the shock is going through your
system, so they don’t numb your foot.”
    I remembered the dream with the frozen body below
me, but with one foot twitching wildly. “Nothing out of the ordinary happened during
the procedure?” I asked as she lowered the gown over my head.
    “What an odd question. No, nothing happened—the
procedure went well. And look how good you’re doing.” She fussed a bit with the
gown and then helped me under the covers. When she finished, she pointed to a
door in the corner. “The bathroom’s right through there. It’s just a sink and a
toilet.” She pushed the wheelchair against the wall. “Now try to get some
sleep. Have a good night.”
    “Thank you,” I said to her as she turned off the
overhead lights and closed the door.
    I leaned over and turned on the lamp on the
bedside table. I had no idea what time it was, but it couldn’t be late. It was
dark outside, but we had just eaten dinner. I looked around. There was no TV,
no books or magazines in the room to occupy my mind. I wondered if I asked
someone for such things if I would get them. They couldn’t expect people to sit
around and stare out the window or at the walls. But then I thought back to my
dinner companion. His nervous habits, the way he kept staring off into the
distance…maybe my fellow patients had a lot going on inside their heads, enough
to keep them occupied. The old woman, for instance, had come up with her own
personal murder mystery.
    But with a lack of anything else to do, I also stared
at the walls, going over everything that had happened. I tried to think back,
tried to remember something that happened before I woke up in the padded room,
but my mind was still a blank.
    How did I
get here? Where is my family?
    As the questions crossed my mind, a sharp pain
radiated out from the middle of my forehead. Minutes passed and the pain slowly
eased up—it wasn’t as severe as before, but it was still there, throbbing
across my temples every time I tried to remember. After a while, exhausted, I
nodded off to sleep.
     
    * * *
     
    My eyes opened. There was something in the room; I was not
alone. I raised my head and realized someone was standing at the foot of my
bed. It took my sleep-fogged brain a moment to comprehend that what I was
looking at—the dark shape standing only a few feet away—was not a
living creature.Moonlight shone through the
window and I realized I could see through the shape’s blackness. I could make out the wall