The Possession of Emma Sloan

My name is Dan Sloan. My daughter Emma went up to St. Albans for a postgraduate year, and after she and some girls messed with an old Ouija board in the basement, the school's main desk started calling my cell, five times since Christmas. Emma doesn't even go there anymore, but every time I pick up, nobody answers. I'd gone past the turn for St. Albans a few hundred times before she ever applied, a 13th year of high school, which half those prep schools offer and nobody in our town has ever heard of. She was 19. Her dorm was on the third floor of a building with no elevator, and the beds in it were older than I am. I drove back into town, bought a four-inch foam mattress topper, and carried it up three flights while she stood at the top of the stairwell telling me I didn't have to do that. She signed her own housing form at the desk while I stood behind her holding the topper, and after she went inside, I sat in that parking lot a while and didn't start the truck. I sell building supplies out of Pittsfield, 22 years on the road running western mass and Vermont with a phone jammed to my ear. Back then, Emma just sounded like an excited kid leaving home. The call's home started right away, and we never had to chase her for them. Tuesday and Friday, around seven. She'd call. She'd talk first, and she'd talk longest, and a good half of it was about the food. The eggs were wrong every single week, in some new way she'd worked out since Tuesday. Then she'd get to the homework. Then she'd cut across whatever I was saying to tell me something June had said. The third week, she sounded tired. She put it on a Latin test and on a radiator under her window that ran all night and couldn't be shut off, and she said she'd been sleeping on top of the covers with the window open. The Friday after that, she answered everything I asked her, and she didn't ask me anything. I don't mean she was rude, she was perfectly pleasant. I'd ask how the Latin went, and she'd say it went fine, and I'd wait, and nothing else would come, so I'd ask her something else. I'd ask how the food was, and the food was okay. I got off that call, and I was halfway down the driveway to bring the barrels in. Before I noticed, I'd asked her eleven questions, and she hadn't asked me one. She missed the next Tuesday, I gave it until a quarter to eight, and then I called the dorm, which I'd promised her it'd move in I'd never do. And a woman on the desk said, "Emma was in study hall, and couldn't come down to the phone." I said that was fine, it was fine. She called Thursday instead, and she was herself. I offered to come and get her for the weekend. I'd drive up Friday after my last call, have her back Sunday night. She said no, she just said she'd rather stay. I said all right then, stay. I told Linda that night that Emma would rather be up there than home, and Linda said, "Well, there you go." Then right at the end of that call, she was in the middle of telling me what they'd done to the eggs that week, and she said, "And they still can't get it right, Father. I don't know how they manage it." I let her finish. Then I said, "What did you just call me?" She said, "What?" You called me Father. She laughed and asked what was the matter with me, and then she had to go because June was back. Emma has called me Dad since she was eighteen months old. When she's mad, she doesn't call me anything, and when she's joking around, she calls me Sloan. But she has never called me Father in nineteen years. Nobody in our family talks like that. You say Father to a priest in a confessional or you hear it in church. It wasn't just the word, it was how it came out. She didn't lean on it, and she didn't say it like a joke, like she was answering someone else entirely. I asked Linda to get on the next call with me. She asked what she was listening for, and I didn't have an answer for her. I knew how it sounded. Linda got on the Friday call anyway. Twenty minutes near enough. Emma was loud and funny and told us at some length that the eggs had reached a new low. In other words, Linda said she sounded like a girl who isn't sleeping enough. I said I thought so too. The call came through on a Thursday morning while I was standing in the yard at a lumber supplier in Bennington, and I didn't know the number, which is the only reason I answered it with hello instead of a name. He said he was Glenn Calloway, Dean of Students at St. Opens, and then he said he was sorry to be calling me at work. Everybody had was a list and he read it off. I could hear him reading it. Two assignments missed in one class and one in another. The teacher had reported that Emma had been speaking formally. In twice that week, she'd answered a question in class with something that had nothing to do with the question. I asked if she was in trouble. He said no. Then he said he wanted to be careful and say that as far as the school could tell she was safe and that was the first minute of that conversation I didn't like. I finished in the yard, which took 40 minutes, and I didn't wait for the weekend. I threw my order sheets on the passenger seat and drove straight north to St. Opens. I pulled into the school just after five. One of the teachers took me down to an empty office in Sabin Hall and brought Emma in, so the two of us could talk alone. She sat across from me with her sleeves pulled down over her hands, looking like she hadn't slept a full night in weeks, but the second I brought up the missed classes and what the teacher had told me about the Ouija board, she went straight on defense. She told me they only brought the board down into the basement because they were bored out of their minds on weeknights. She said it four separate times that it was just a dumb game that everybody knew it was a joke. I asked her why she was looking so worn down if it was just a joke. She stopped. She wouldn't look at me, just kept picking at a loose thread on her cuff, and then she started talking about how freezing cold that basement was. How the damp down there got into your bones after an hour and how by the fourth night the board had started spelling out answers before anyone even finished asking the question. I asked her who she thought was moving it. Emma finally looked up at me, dead serious, and told me that by the end none of their hands were on it. Most of those nights they spent arguing about which of them was pushing it. June said she knew for a fact somebody was pushing it because at one point she had pushed it herself. Then she told me something I hadn't brought up. She said it had started answering before they'd finished asking, not every time. But enough of the time that they'd begun stopping halfway through a question on purpose to see and it kept doing it. I asked her what she thought it was. She said somebody was pushing it. Callaway walked me down to the basement of Saban Hall himself. It's a storage room and a corridor with pipes running the length of it. Stacked chairs, 60 of them at a guess. A mop sink with a hose bib over it. Cardboard boxes of what I took to be old hymnals gone soft at the corners. The board was still on the floor in the corner where they'd left it with three candles standing in saucers and a bag of pretzels that had been open a long while. No smell but the mop sink. It's a room where a school keeps chairs. The notebook was a composition book with a marbled cover and most of it was what you'd expect. Dates at the top of the pages. Questions in four different hands. Answers spelled out letter by letter with the letters run together so you had to read them twice. A lot crossed out. In the margins, the arguing. That was you. No it wasn't. Stop it. She had a phone in her pocket and she knew I'd pick up. She asked the board. Callaway went back up at some point to take something and I stayed down there with a maintenance man who would come in to look at a valve and had ended up looking at the chairs with me instead. He was telling me those chairs had been in that room since before he started and then the phone on the wall rang. It's a beige phone screwed up by the door with a cord on it. It rang once and stopped and then nothing. He didn't go over to it. He said the phones in that building did that and that they'd been meaning to take them out for years and then he went back to the valve. I found Callaway in his office before I left and asked him whether anything like this had ever happened at that school before. He said he wasn't aware. of anything directly comparable. Then he asked whether I'd given the notebook back to Dr. Kabul, said I had, and he said good, and walked me out to the lot. What we agreed on before I left was that Emma was worn out, and that the four of them had made something between them and talked each other into it. What she needed was sleep, food, no more basement. Callaway caught me on the way out and asked if I had twenty minutes, so I went over to his office in Saban Hall, and we talked about whether she'd be finishing the term. I called Linda from his desk phone at a quarter to nine because my own phone was in the car. A groundsman came in twice while I was there, once for a key, and once because he'd forgotten what he'd come in for the first time. June saw Emma leave the dorm about half past eight. She was dressed for outside, and she had her hands in her sleeves. June said goodnight to her. Emma said goodnight back, and that was all of it. By about nine, the staff on the dorm couldn't place her. They checked the library, the two study rooms, the dining hall that was already closed, and the room of every girl on that hall. By twenty past, they had four people walking the grounds. Callaway came and got me himself, which I appreciated because he didn't send anybody. He called the police from the same desk phone I'd used. He said a residential student was unaccounted for, and he gave them her name and her age, and when he said the age I heard the conversation on the other end change. She was 19 and allowed to go wherever she wanted, so there wasn't a great deal for them to do. They found her at about ten, sitting on the floor of the corridor that runs along the side of the chapel with her back against the wall and her knees up. She wasn't hurt, and she wasn't especially cold. She looked like somebody who had sat down for a minute and lost track. She couldn't tell anybody where she'd been between half past eight and then, and she didn't try to. She said she thought she might have fallen asleep. Her phone was on the charger in her room and had been there since before dinner. The police took statements from June, from the dorm staff, from Callaway, and from me, and looked at the chapel corridor and the two doors at either end of it. She was over 18, and she declined to be examined. They closed at that night. One of them told me in the parking lot that if she'd been 17, he'd have had a different job to do. I asked Callaway the next morning, whether anything like this had happened at that school before, and this time I didn't leave him away out of it. There were two he knew of, and he answered exactly what I put to him and not a word past it. He also gave me a name. Agnes Rucker taught at St. Aubins for 31 years and lives about four miles from the gate, and I called her from the car and she told me to come by, which I did that afternoon. Her house smelled like dry heating vents and old paper. She sat in a floral armchair with her hands folded in her lap and she didn't offer me tea or pretend we were having a social call. She looked at me with the tired, heavy guilt of someone who had been waiting a decade and a half to confess. She told me the school's file was a lie. The girl from 15 years ago didn't just have a hard semester. She didn't just drop out and go home to rest. "She stopped sleeping," Agnes said, her voice completely flat. Then about three weeks later, she stopped speaking. By November, she stopped moving altogether. She would just sit in the infirmary bed, staring at the wall. I asked her what the doctors had said. They called it "severe catatonia," but it wasn't a medical condition, Mr. Sloan. It was a refusal. Something inside her had simply decided that the body didn't need to respond anymore. Agnes looked down at her hands. Her muscles locked into rigid, impossible tension. Catilepsy. You couldn't unbend her arms. She died in a state psychiatric ward the following February. Her heart just gave out from the continuous, unbroken physical strain. I walked straight past the front desk of her dorm, took the stairs to it a time and pushed Emma's door open. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at the radiator. She didn't look up when I came in. I grabbed her duffle bag and started throwing her clothes into it. I packed her shoes, her books, the four-inch mattress topper I'd carried up those stairs in August. I told her we were leaving. She didn't argue. She didn't ask why. She just stood up, her arms hanging limp at her sides and followed me down to the truck like someone walking in their sleep. The drive home took three hours. Emma didn't say a single word. She didn't look out the window. She just stared at the dashboard. I turned to the heat all the way up, but she sat perfectly still, shivering the entire way down the interstate. For the first two weeks at home, Linda thought it was a nervous breakdown. She took time off work. She made soups. She bought different teas. She sat on the edge of Emma's bed and brushed her hair. Linda kept saying that the school had pushed her too hard, that those girls in the basement had frightened her and that she just needed time to decompress. But I had seen Agnes Rucker's eyes. I knew it wasn't stress. By the third week, Emma stopped answering us. You could ask her a direct question. Ask her if she was thirsty. Ask her if the room was too cold, and she would just look right through you. By the fourth week, she stopped blinking. Linda found her sitting in the living room chair one morning, staring at a blank patch of drywall. Her eyes were completely bloodshot. Linda waved a hand right in front of her face, and Emma's eyelids didn't even flutter. Her body had just stopped recognizing the instinct to protect itself. We took her to the emergency room in Pittsfield. That was the beginning of the medical dead end. They ran blood panels, MRIs, lumbar punctures, and toxicological screens. They put a name on it because doctors always have to put a name on it. They called it autoimmune encephalitis. They said her immune system was attacking her brainstem, causing severe neurological misfires. They prescribed heavy courses of intravenous steroids. They kept her in the neurology wing for 10 days. Nothing changed. In fact, she got worse. The stiffness started in the hospital. I walked in on a Tuesday morning and found a resident doctor trying to draw blood from her arm. Emma's arm was bent at a harsh right angle, her fist closed tight. The resident was sweating, trying to gently pull her arm straight to find a vein. It wasn't that Emma was fighting him or thrashing around. It was that her muscles had locked into a state of absolute unyielding tension, like the joint had turned to stone. Her breathing remained completely shallow, her eyes fixed on the ceiling tiles. The hospital discharged her right before Thanksgiving. They said there was nothing more they could do in an acute care setting. They gave us a referral to a long-term psychiatric care facility. The exact kind of place the girl from St. Albans had died in. I tore the referral up in the parking lot. We brought her home and turned our living room into a hospice ward. I sell building supplies. I spend my life fixing structural problems, tracking inventory and managing logistics. I am a man who solves problems with my hands. And suddenly, my entire existence was reduced to sitting in a plastic chair in my own living room. We had a hospital bed set up by the front window. The house started to smell like a clinic that distinct underlying scent of iodine, sterile plastic and stale, anxious air. Emma was losing weight, the padding of her cheeks hollowed out. Then the voice came. It happened in the dead of night. I was asleep in the armchair next to her bed. I woke up to a dry, clicking sound like teeth grinding together. I leaned over the bedrails. Emma was perfectly still. Her head pressed into the mattress. Her eyes were open, but they were entirely fixed. Human eyes are never perfectly still. They dart, they track, they make micro adjustments to light. Emma's were completely locked, staring straight up at the ceiling, unblinking, the surface of them going dull and dry. She looked at me. And for the first time in a month, she spoke. It wasn't a demon with a deep theatrical roar. It was much worse because it was just biology pushed. to a breaking point. She spoke on the inhale. It was a harsh, wet, rattling sound pulled backward down her throat, using air in a way human anatomy isn't designed to support. She didn't move an inch. She just stared into my eyes, drawing a breath backward over her vocal cords and rasped. The foundation is rotten, Dan, it's going to collapse and bury you all. It was aligned from a conversation I'd had with Merle on the phone a week ago. A conversation about a bad concrete poor at a job site in Vermont. She had heard it. Whatever was inside her had been lying in that hospital bed, perfectly still, listening to every single word spoken in the house. The home care nurses quit three days later. A nurse named Sarah had come to adjust Emma's IV line. Emma's head rolled slowly to the side on the pillow. She didn't threaten the nurse. Speaking on that horrible, dragging inhale, she just looked at her and quietly methodically recited the exact details of a medical mistake Sarah had made at a previous hospital. Names, dates, the exact dosage of the wrong medication she had pushed into a line. Sarah dropped her clipboard, backed out of the living room, and never returned. We were completely isolated. The doctors wouldn't do home visits, the nurses wouldn't come back, and Linda was practically hollowed out with grief and terror. I called father Dugay, I had run out of science, and I had run out of pride. Dugay arrived at the house on a freezing Tuesday evening. He didn't come in a flowing casak. He came in a heavy wool sweater carrying a worn leather satchel. He looked at Emma who was lying flat, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, her breath rattling in her throat. Dugay told me the diocese would take months to approve a formal exorcism. They would want psychological evaluations, medical records, and a dozen different hearings. He said Emma didn't have months. He said she didn't have a week. He took a purple stole from his bag, kissed it, and placed it around his neck. He opened a small battered copy of the rituale ramanum. "I need you to hold her hands, Dan," he said. "Do not let go. Do not speak to it. No matter what it says to you, you only look at me." The exorcism was not a battle of magic. It was a grueling, exhausting physical endurance test. There was no howling wind in the room. The lights didn't flicker. It was just three terrified adults and a girl strapped to a bed in the suburban living room that smelled like stale air and sickness. As Dugay began the Latin prayers, the entity didn't argue theology. It didn't mock his faith. It simply locked Emma's body into a state of impossible, agonizing rigidity to make him stop. I held my daughter's hands against the mattress. She didn't thrash. She didn't fight me. Instead she became impossibly heavy, her muscles turning to unyielding stone. The unseen pressure inside her was expanding. The steel frame of the bed groaned under the sheer, sustained tension of her fixed posture. I was crying. My boots braced against the hardwood floor, straining just to hold onto her hands. Keep reading, I told the priest, my voice breaking. Dugay stepped forward, pressed his thumb against Emma's cold forehead and raised his voice. He demanded it to know where it came from. Emma's head lulled back, her jaw opened in a wide, unnatural stretch. Speaking on that awful backward breath, it didn't give a name. It laughed. It was a dry scraping sound, like dead leaves dragging across concrete. It told us it came from the dark in Saban Hall. It said it had been down there by the pipes, waiting for decades. And when those four-board girls brought that piece of cardboard down into the cold and open to door, it didn't choose the girl who pushed the plastic piece. It chose her because her mind was already tired, and it was incredibly easy to slip inside. Dugay didn't flinch. He pressed the stole against her chest, closed his eyes, and began the final adoration. The pressure in the room became suffocating. Emma let out a scream that stripped her own vocal cords. The human brain installs limiters to keep us from destroying our own bodies. Whatever was driving her didn't have limiters. It pushed her vocal cords until I heard them tear, her mouth, filling with blood. The sheer volume of it vibrating the glass in the front windows until they rattled against the dry wall. I buried my face in the mattress, holding her hands, praying for it to end. And then it just snapped. The tension vanished entirely. Emma went completely slack, collapsing into the mattress. The suffocating weight in the room evaporated in a single second. The air suddenly felt ordinary again. For a terrible, agonizing minute, I thought she had slipped away. Just like the girl from fifteen years ago, I scrambled up my hands shaking violently and grabbed her wrist. Her pulse was there. It was weak, thready, but it was steady. Emma opened her eyes. The terrible, fixed stare was gone. She looked at the ceiling, then slowly turned her head to look at me. Her eyes tracking naturally, and tears spilled over her eyelashes. "Dad," she whispered. Her voice was wrecked, raw, and barely a croak. It was her. Duget collapsed into the armchair next to the bed, burying his face in his hands. His shoulders shaking as he quietly thanked God. I pulled Emma into my arms and held her, crying until my chest ached. For three weeks, it felt like a miracle. The recovery was astonishing. The hospital bed went back to the medical supply company. The IVs came out. Emma started eating solid food again, slowly at first, then with a steady appetite. The sharp hollow angles of her face softened as the color returned to her cheeks. She put on eight pounds. The doctors at the clinic called it a spontaneous remission. They wrote it up in her chart as a medical anomaly and told us we were incredibly lucky. Linda was overjoyed. She practically glowed. She started talking about Christmas, about taking a trip, about Emma applying to the local community college for the spring semester. The house was quiet, it was ordinary, it was safe. I have spent over 40,000 hours of my life listening to the minute variations in the human voice over bad cell connections. I know what a voice sounds like when a contractor is reading off a script and I know what it sounds like when someone is smiling just to get off the line. I know the exact cadence of human thought. I know when there is nothing real behind the words. The first time I noticed it, we were in the kitchen. Emma was unloading the dishwasher. She fumbled a heavy ceramic coffee mug, it hit the linoleum floor and shattered into a dozen pieces, Emma gasped and jumped backward. But my ear caught it. The startle response was delayed. It happened a fraction of a second after the noise. It was a calculated physical reaction applied after the event, not triggered by it. I started watching her. I didn't tell Linda, I didn't want to break my wife's heart if I was just being paranoid. I just sat in my armchair with the evening paper and I listened. I noticed that Emma didn't sigh anymore. When people sit down, when they get tired, when they read something frustrating, they sigh. Emma never did. I noticed her breathing. I sat across from her while she watched television with Linda and I watched her chest rise and fall. It never varied. Not when she shifted her weight, not when a loud commercial came on, not when she stood up to go to the kitchen, perfectly spaced. I noticed her laugh. When she told a joke or when she laughed at something Linda said, the inflection in her voice perfectly mirrored the exact cadence Linda used. She was pitch matching. She wasn't acting like Emma. She was acting like what a 19-year-old girl is supposed to act like. The realization didn't come with a dramatic, terrifying shock. It came as a quiet, sickening weight settling into the bottom of my stomach. The exorcism hadn't worked. The sudden silence in the living room that night hadn't been the entity leaving. I didn't need a medical degree or a priest to tell me what had happened. I just had to look at my daughter sitting on the couch. The possession didn't end. It completed itself. The exorcism didn't cast the thing out. It cast Emma out. My daughter was gone. She had slipped away quietly on that mattress in the living room while I was holding her hands. The climax didn't happen in a storm. It happened on a Tuesday morning. Linda had already left for work. I was standing at the kitchen counter, pouring a cup of coffee, staring blindly at the frost on the window pane. I heard footsteps behind me. Emma walked into the kitchen. She was wearing her thick bathrobe, her hair tied up in a messy knot. She walked over to the fruit bowl, picked up an apple and turned to look at the snow in the yard. I turned around and looked at her. And right there in the harsh, flat, fluorescent light of the kitchen, she dropped the act. The warm, bright, 19-year-old smile melted entirely off her face. The micro expressions, the tiny, involuntary muscle movements of human empathy, just vanished. Her features went completely slack, settling into an expression of cold, absolute stillness. Her eyes didn't turn black. She didn't speak on the inhale. She just stood there, holding an apple, wearing my daughter's face. She took a slow step closer to me. When she spoke, it was Emma's exact, ordinary voice. The cadence was the flat, formal rhythm she had used on the phone from the dorm months ago, when she called me father. The priest thinks he won, she whispered, her voice barely carrying over the hum of the refrigerator. But there was never enough room in here for both of us. She held my gaze for two agonizing, suffocating seconds. I couldn't breathe. My hands gripped the edge of the granite counter so hard my knuckles went white. Then the warm, bright smile snapped perfectly back into place. Her shoulders dropped into a relaxed posture. She took a loud crunch of the apple, turned around, and started walking toward the hallway stairs. "I'm going to take a shower, Dad," she called out over her shoulder, her tone light and breezy. "Can you make sure the hot water heater is turned up?" I didn't answer. I just stood frozen in the quiet kitchen, listening to her footsteps on the stairs, knowing with absolute crushing certainty that I was trapped in this house with it for the rest of my life. That's a wrap on this entry. I hope you enjoyed the ride. It was a heavy one. If you want to keep exploring the dark with me, hit like and subscribe to lock in your spot with the nocturnal crew. Thanks for watching and take care.