“No,” said Chandler, “certainly not!” But then he had to stop and think. After all, he had never been possessed before; in fact, he had always retained a certain skepti-cism about “possession”it seemed like such a convenient way for anyone to do any illicit thing he choseuntil the moment when he looked up to see Peggy Flershem walking into the culture room with a tray of agar disks, and was astonished to find himself striking her with the wrench in his hand and ripping at her absurdly floral-printed slacks. Maybe his case was different. Maybe it wasn’t the sort of possession that struck at random; maybe he was just off his rocker.
Margot, his wife, had been cut up cruelly. He had seen his friend, Jack Souther, leaving his home hurriedly as he approached; and although he had thought that the stains on his clothes looked queerly like blood, nothing in that prepared him for what he found in the rumpus room. It had taken him some time to identify the spread-out dis-section on the ffoor with his wife Margot …
“No,” he told his lawyer, “I was shaken up, of course.
The worst time was the next night, when there was a knock on the door and I opened it and it was Jack. He’d come to apologize. Iwell, I got over it. I tell you I was possessed, that’s all.”
“And I tell you that defense will put you right in front of a firing squad,” said his lawyer. “And thafs all.”
Five or six others had been executed for hoaxing; Chandler was familiar with the ritual. He even understood it, in a way. The world had gone to pot in the previous two years. The real enemy was out of reach; when any citizen might run wild and, when caught, relapse into his own self, terrified and sick, there was a need to strike back.
But the enemy was invisible. The hoaxers were only whipping boysbut they were the only targets vengeance had.
The real enemy had struck the entire world in a single night. One day the people of the world went about their business in the gloomy knowledge that they were likely to make mistakes but with, at least, the comfort that the mistakes would be their own. The next day had not such comfort. The next day anyone, anywhere, was likely to find himself seized, possessed, working evil or whimsy without ever having formed the intention to do so … and helplessly. Demons? Martians? No one knew whether the invaders of the soul were from another world or from some djinn’s bottle. All they knew was that they were helpless against them.
Chandler stood up, kicked the balled-up wax paper from his sandwiches across the floor and swore violently.
He was beginning to wake from the shock that had gripped him. “Damn fool,” he said to himself. He had no particular reason. Like the world, he needed a whipping boy too, if only himself. “Damn fool, you know they’re going to shoot you!”
He stretched and twisted his body violently, alone in the middle of the room, in silence. He had to wake up. He had to start thinking. In a quarter of an hour or less the court would reconvene, and from then it was only a steady, quick slide ‘to the grave.
It was better to do anything than to do nothing. He examined the windows of his improvised cell. They were above his head and barred; standing on the table, he could see feet walking outside, in the paved playyard of the school. He discarded the thought of escaping that way; there was no one to smuggle him a file, and there was no time. He studied the door to the hall. It was not impossible that when the guard opened it he could jump him, knock him out, run … run where? The room had been a storage place for athletic equipment at the end of a hall; the hall led only to the stairs and the stairs emerged into the courtroom. It was quite likely, he thought, that the hall had another flight of stairs somewhere farther along, or through another room. What had he spent his taxes on these years, if not for schools designed with more than one exit in case of fire? But as he had not thought to mark an escape route when he was brought in, it did him no good.
The guard, however, had a gun. Chandler lifted up an edge of the table and tried to shake one of the legs. They did not shake; that part of his taxes had been well enough spent, he thought wryly. The chair? Could he smash the chair to get a club, which would give him a weapon to get the guard’s gun?…
Before he reached the chair the door opened and his lawyer came in.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said briskly. “Well. As your attorney I have to tell you they’ve presented a damaging case.
As I see it”
“What case?” Chandler demanded. “I never denied the acts. What else did they prove?”
“Oh, God!” said his lawyer, not quite loudly enough to be insulting. “Do we have to go over that again? Your claim of possession would make a defense if it had happened anywhere else. We know that these cases exist, but we also know that they follow a pattern. Some areas seem to be immunemedical establishments, pharmaceutical plants among them. So they proved that all this happened in a pharmaceutical plant. I advise you to plead guilty.”
Chandler sat down on the edge of the table, controlling himself very well, he thought. He only asked: “Would that do me any good at all?”
“The lawyer reflected, gazing at the ceiling. “… No.”
Chandler nodded. “So what else shall we talk about?
Want to compare notes about where you were and I was the night the President went possessed?”
The lawyer was irritated. He kept his mouth shut for a moment until he thought he could keep from showing it.
Outside a vendor was hawking amulets: “St. Ann beads!
Witch knots! Fresh garlic, local grown, best in town!” The lawyer shook his head.
“All right,” he said, “it’s your life. We’ll do it your way.
Anyway, time’s up; Sergeant Grantz will be banging On the door any minute.”
He zipped up his briefcase. Chandler did not move.
‘They don’t give us much time anyway,” the lawyer added, angry at Chandler and at hoaxers in general but not willing to say so. “Grantz is a stickler for promptness.”
Chandler found a crumb of cheese by his hand and absently ate it. The lawyer watched him and glanced at his watch. “Oh, hell,” he said, picked up his briefcase and kicked the base of the door. “Grantz! What’s the matter with you? You asleep out there?”
Chandler was sworn, gave his name, admitted the truth of everything the previous witnesses had said. The faces were still aimed at him, every one. He could not read them at all any more, could not tell if they were friendly or hating, there were too many and they all had eyes. The jurors sat on their funeral-parlor chairs like cadavers, em-balmed and propped, the dead witnessing a wake for the living. Only the forewoman in the funny hat showed signs of life, looking alertly at Chandler, at the judge, at the man next to her, around the auditorium. Maybe it was a good sign. At least she did not have the frozen-in-concrete, guilty-as-hell look of the others.
His attorney asked him the question he had been waiting for: “Tell us, in your own words, what happened.”
Chandler opened his mouth, and paused. Curiously, he had forgotten what he wanted to say. He had rehearsed this moment again and again; but all that came out was: “I didn’t do it. I mean, I did the acts, but I was possessed. That’s all. Others have done worse, under the same circumstances, and been let off. Just as Fisher was acquitted for murdering the Leamards, as Draper got off after what he did to the Cline boy. As Jack Souther over there was let off after he murdered my own wife. They should be. They couldn’t help themselves. Whatever this thing is that takes control, I know it can’t be fought. My God, you can’t even try to fight it!”
He was not getting through. The faces had not changed.
The forewoman of the jury was now searching systematically through her pocketbook, taking each item out and examining it, putting it back and taking out another. But between times she looked at him and at least her expression wasn’t hostile. He said, addressing her: “That’s all there is to it. It wasn’t me running my body.
It was someone else. I swear it before all of you, and before God.”
“The prosecutor did not bother to question him.
Chandler went back to his seat and sat down and watched the next twenty minutes go by in the wink of an eye, rapid, rapid; they were in a hurry to shoot him. He could hardly believe that Judge Ellithorp could speak so fast; the jurymen rose and filed out at a gallop, zip, whisk, and they were back again. Too fast! he cried silently, time had gone into high gear; but he knew that it was only his imagination. The twenty minutes had been a full twelve hundred seconds. And then time, as if to make amends, came to a stop, abrupt, brakes on. The judge asked the jury for their verdict and it was an eternity before the forewoman arose.