She made a weird noise. The laugh did not sound like her. It sounded like two voices talking at once, one low and one high, and neither of them matched her mouth. Her brother Jack stood by the kitchen table holding a chair leg like it might help. It would not help. He knew that already.
“Say her name,” he said. “Say Anna.”
The thing in the chair tilted its head. “Anna isn’t home right now,” it said, and it smiled.
This kind of thing gets written up online all the time, people trading scary possession stories in comment sections like recipes, arguing about which parts are fake. Jack used to read those threads for fun, late at night, half laughing at how dumb some of them sounded. He was not laughing now. He was standing in his mother’s kitchen holding a chair leg at his sister.
He tried to remember how it started, because his brain kept reaching for that, like understanding the start would help him survive the middle. It didn’t really work like that. The memory came in pieces, out of order.
Three days ago. Maybe four. Anna had found a box in the attic, old stuff from their grandmother, and there was a small wooden object in it, carved rough, like a person or an animal, hard to tell which. She’d put it on her nightstand because she thought it was interesting. That was it. That was the whole beginning. No warning, no bad dream, nothing dramatic. She just put an old carved thing on her nightstand and two nights later she woke up screaming that something was standing on her chest, except nothing was there, and Jack had checked, and there was nothing there.
He didn’t know if the object caused it. He still doesn’t. Nobody explained it to him and he never got a clean explanation later either. That’s not how it went.
Back in the kitchen, Anna’s head snapped toward him fast, faster than a neck should move.
“You’re thinking about the box,” she said, in the wrong voice. “Don’t.”
“Get out of her,” Jack said, which felt stupid the second he said it, like something from a movie, but he didn’t have better words.
The thing laughed again, that double laugh. Anna’s body slid off the chair onto the floor, not falling exactly, more like something set her down carelessly. Her back arched up off the tile in a way that had to hurt, had to be tearing something inside her, but she didn’t seem to feel it, or the thing controlling her didn’t care.
Their mother came in from the hallway then, saw Anna on the floor, and dropped the laundry basket she was carrying. She didn’t scream. She just stood there for a second, and then she said, very calm, “Jack, get the salt,” and he did, because it was something to do, even though he didn’t know if it would work, and honestly it probably wouldn’t.
He poured salt in a rough line near the doorway. It felt useless. Anna’s body twisted again and her hand grabbed the table leg and pulled herself upright, wrong angles, wrong speed.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” the voice said to their mother, almost bored.
“Neither do you,” their mother said back, which surprised Jack, because it wasn’t brave exactly, it was just true. Nobody in that kitchen understood what was happening. Not really. There was no priest yet, no plan, just a family standing around trying things because standing around doing nothing felt worse.
Anna’s eyes rolled back for a second, just white, and then came forward again, and for one second it looked like her, actually her, scared and confused, mouthing something without sound. Then it was gone again, replaced by whatever had been driving the laugh.
Jack didn’t know what came next. He didn’t know how this kind of thing ended, if it ended. He just stood there holding a chair leg he still hadn’t used, watching his sister’s body do things bodies shouldn’t do, and waiting.
