The First possession
828 Words
The word lingered.
Mine.
It didn’t sound. It wasn’t written anywhere she could erase. It was inside Lena's head, yet still somehow on the mirror’s lips.
Lena stumbled backward until her shoulders slammed into the bathroom wall. Her breath came in ragged bursts, and every nerve screamed at her to look away, to hide. She wrenched the bathroom door open, plunging the dorm into light, but the reflection burned behind her eyelids like an afterimage.
She spent the rest of the night perched on her bed, back pressed to the cold cinderblock wall, too afraid to move. Every shiny surface in the room felt dangerous—the mirror above the sink, the blank black screen of her laptop, even the faint gloss of the window. She kept her gaze fixed on the ceiling, her thoughts looping like a broken record.
What’s happening to me? What’s happening to me?
By dawn, she was still awake.
And she was no longer sure all of her thoughts belonged to her.
*************
Later that day, the lecture hall smelled of chalk and coffee, its buzzing fluorescent lights stabbing at her tired eyes. Lena slid into a seat near the back, her limbs heavy, her mind a fog.
Her notebook lay open in front of her. She wasn’t taking notes. She barely had the strength to keep her head up.
Her right hand rested against the page, the pen nestled loosely between her fingers.
Then her grip tightened.
Her arm jerked, sudden, mechanical.
Lena froze.
Her fingers clenched around the pen as though someone else had seized the muscles. Her wrist dragged across the paper, scrawling, ink scratching with frantic determination.
One word. Over and over, sprawling in uneven strokes:
Alaric.
Her breath hitched. What—? Stop. Stop! She tried to pull her hand back, but her body resisted, jerking like a marionette yanked by invisible strings. The pen dug so hard that the nib tore the paper.
Alaric. Alaric. Alaric.
The name repeated, insistent, a chant written in her own hand yet utterly alien.
A voice cut through her spiraling panic.
“Miss Carter?”
Lena’s head snapped up.
Her professor, a balding man with steel-framed glasses, peered at her from the front of the room. “Since you seem so intent on writing, perhaps you can share with us. What are the key tenets of Locke’s social contract theory?”
Heat flushed her face. Her throat closed. She hadn’t even heard the question.
She opened her mouth to stammer out the only answer she could manage: I don’t know.
But the words that spilled out weren’t hers.
They came low. Cold. Measured, with a faint, lilting cadence that didn’t belong to her generation—or even this century.
“Locke argues that political authority is derived from the consent of the governed, who enter into a social contract to protect natural rights—life, liberty, and property. This, he contends, is the only justifiable basis for civil society.”
The words rolled smoothly and confidently, every syllable crisp. Lena’s own voice, yet not.
A silence fell over the lecture hall.
Dozens of faces turned toward her.
Her classmates stared as though she’d suddenly started speaking in tongues. The girl sitting beside her shifted her chair an inch farther away, the scrape of metal on the ground unbearably loud in the hush.
The professor blinked, surprised. His mouth twitched with grudging approval. “Correct,” he said. “Quite… thorough.”
Lena’s blood ran cold. She hadn’t known that answer. She hadn’t known any of it.
Her hands shook as she dragged them into her lap, fighting to steady her breathing. The notebook lay open before her, the pages bleeding with one name in furious loops.
Alaric.
The day dissolved into a blur of whispers and stares. She caught people glancing at her as she walked the halls, then quickly looking away. Every murmur sounded like her name.
By the time she stumbled back into her dorm room, her chest ached from holding her breath.
The diary lay waiting on her desk, exactly where she’d left it.
Her fury boiled over. With a strangled cry, she seized it and hurled it onto her bed.
It landed with a thud, pages fanning open.
Lena turned away, pressing her palms into her eyes. “Leave me alone,” she whispered, her voice raw.
But when she finally forced herself to look, her stomach dropped.
Every single page was filled.
Front to back.
Not neat, elegant script this time, but frantic, sprawling handwriting that clawed across the paper as though scrawled in desperation.
The same phrase repeated until it blurred together, letters colliding, spilling into one another like a flood she couldn’t stop:
She’s coming.
Over and over. A chorus written in her own future.
The words swam before her eyes until she couldn’t breathe.
The diary wasn’t waiting anymore.
It was a warning.
And whatever it warned of was already on its way.
- Writer
