Dead Stream Curse: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  He seemed not to hear her as he pressed his hands against the brick walls.

  “I feel it. I feel you,” he whispered.

  Liv watched him and shuddered. She imagined just beyond those bricks, something waited; something with teeth.

  “I want it,” Stephen told her. “The power. You can help me get it, Liv. Destiny, that’s what brought you here.”

  Stephen was silent on their walk back to the asylum.

  At a large brick building, he fished out his keys and unlocked a door.

  He led her up a dark, echoey stairway. Heavy white doors closed off each floor. They walked until Liv’s legs burned, and then he stopped, pulling out another keyring.

  She stood stiff, arms pressed against her sides, fearing if she moved too much, she might plummet down the cement stairs behind her.

  When the door swung open, she gazed into a large attic with angled ceilings and wood beams cutting toward the floor. A single lamp sat on the floor near the door, casting long, dark on the walls.

  A bird took flight from a rafter and soared away, disappearing into a shadowy crevice in the high-pointed ceiling.

  In the center of the room, a little cot stood. She saw a bedpan, a glass pitcher of water, and a plate of bread.

  “It’s meager, to be sure,” Stephen offered, “but under the circumstances, you must make do. I wasn’t expecting you, Liv. But I hated to put you in the asylum with the other patients. They can be a rough lot.”

  “You’re able to do this to me, Stephen? Lock me away?”

  Stephen turned Liv to face him, his hands pressing hard into her numb arms.

  His crystalline eyes searched hers, but they lacked the power they’d held in their youth. His eyes had grown empty. No light danced in the spheres of blue.

  He led her to the bed and helped her sit. She considered kicking him. The door was still open, she might escape, but she didn’t.

  Her fate unfolded before her, and she could not run away from it - not this time.

  “Liv, did you really think I’d let you turn us in? Destroy everything I’ve worked so hard to create?”

  Liv shut her eyes.

  “It’s coming, Stephen,” she whispered. “The end is coming for you.”

  Stephen’s eyes darted sideways, his mouth turning down.

  He took a strand of her thick blonde hair, unruly even when pinned back, and pushed it behind her ear.

  “You are the only person I ever loved. Did you know that? The only person in my entire life.” He gazed at her as if mystified, and then he laughed. “But puppy love is all that was, wasn’t it, Liv? A summer romance.”

  “That ended in murder,” she spat, glaring at him.

  He chuckled and stood.

  “Let the past go, Liv. Haven’t you read the new books about living in the now? This,” he gestured at the attic, “is all there is.”

  He undid the bind of her straightjacket but did not loosen it or pull her arms free. He stood and strode across the room, quickly, as if he feared she might wriggle free before he could escape through the door and lock it behind him.

  Liv listened to his footsteps disappear down the stairs.

  It took several minutes, but she freed her arms. She shoved the straightjacket to the floor and drank half the pitcher of water in two gulps.

  “What now?” she asked the empty room.

  The bird had returned to its roost. It watched her from its small black eye. It stretched its wings, ruffling its feathers. Liv watched the tremor move up the bird’s body. When it shook its wings, a black feather drifted down and landed on the dusty wood floor.

  Liv stood and retrieved it. She tucked it beneath her pillow and fell into a dream-filled sleep.

  * * *

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” George said.

  He stood in the doorway of the cabin, aged and yet the same.

  Liv hung her head, tucking her long wavy hair behind her ears.

  “Don’t fret, Volva. You’re home now.”

  He opened his arms, and she stepped into his solid chest. He smelled, as he always had, of a wood fire and chamomile with other heady scents like garlic and dill. In the hovel, she would find tea and soup simmering.

  In autumn, George prepared for the long winter by making tonics, satchels of healing herbs, and divining the best remedies for the coming season of disease.

  As she stepped across the threshold of her true home, the tension in Liv’s shoulders melted away. She nearly fell as she stumbled to a chair near the fire and collapsed, dropping her head into her hands and sobbing.

  She cried until her sinuses were fat and sore. Her face had grown puffy, and George had not spoken a word.

  When she lifted her head, he placed a mug of tea in her shaking hands and sat opposite her.

  She sipped the chamomile tea spiced with cinnamon.

  George gazed at her, his eyes soft and misty. Liv had never seen George cry, and after a moment the sparkle cleared and his eyes were dry once more.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” Liv started. “I wrote you letters. Hundreds of letters, but I couldn’t send them. I…”

  “I know, child. I know. Do you think we haven’t spoken in all that time? I’ve followed you in my dreams.”

  Liv swallowed and looked away.

  Did he know? Did he know her secrets?

  “We have little time, Volva, so listen to me carefully. A curse is most powerful at the beginning of another ten-year cycle. It is the weakest at the end. To unbind yourself, you must draw the spirit of the cursed back from her Eternity in Darkness. Do you understand me, Liv? You must reawaken the cursed?”

  Liv blinked at George. He did know. He’d always known.

  “But… I can’t. The spirits have abandoned me, George. I’ve tried to call out to them…”

  “Then you have asked the wrong questions, Volva. It is time to try again. The door has already been opened.”

  “The door?” Liv shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “When a curse is contained, it grows strong. Open the doors and let the light in. Banish the darkness.”

  Liv tried to follow his words, but George often spoken in ambiguities that made little sense to her.

  George slid from his chair and knelt, leaning toward a cast-iron pot suspended above the fire. He inhaled the steam before plucking a ladle from a wood block and stirring the contents.

  “Garlic and leek stew?” she asked.

  “The winter will be unseasonably cold. I fear the influenza will strike early and spread fast.”

  Liv sighed and thought of the children she’d left behind in Boston. Little Maggie Sue had been born premature. She regularly took a chill. Only Liv had been able to heal her when illness took hold, but now Liv had gone, and she wondered if she’d ever return.

  “I’m sorry I left, George. I have so many regrets.”

  George did not respond, but merely sat stirring and stirring. The liquid bubbled and popped. Something rancid had replaced the garlic smell, and she wrinkled her nose.

  When she peered closer at the pot, a bit of bone floated up to the surface, and she saw a skull peering out from the oily broth.

  She jumped from her chair.

  When George turned to look at her, she saw all the flesh from his face was gone. His black hair hung in tangles on his bleached scalp.

  Without a word, George stood and slipped through the cabin door and disappeared into the forest.

  Liv tried to follow him, but the forest closed in.

  She’d never been lost in the Stoneroot Forest. She’d never been frightened. Now she was both.

  She turned in circles, chest heaving, until she spotted a wisp of something. She ran after it.

  A black crow soared between the trees. He dove at the forest floor and disappeared into a pile of brush.

  Liv ran to the foliage and pulled at the tangled branches.

  She gasped at George’s skeletal face gazing up at her through the overgrowth.
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br />   Liv woke crying in the asylum attic. She touched her cheek, and then her damp pillow.

  George was dead.

  Chapter 15

  September 1965

  Jesse

  He’d been at the house for three days when he started to look at things. Not merely glance in passing, but really look. A newspaper lay folded in the master bedroom.

  He opened it and studied the date in disbelief.

  October 31, 1945 - nearly twenty years before.

  Who saved a newspaper for such a long time?

  Or - and this was the question that niggled at him - had the occupants not returned since that day? Had October 31st, 1945, been their final day in the house?

  He glanced around the room. A bottle of perfume sat on a glass mirror at the vanity. A mint-green silk robe lay draped over a luggage rack.

  If an illness had come for the family, surely there would be signs. Beds sunken and stained, trays scattered with medicine, wash rags in basins.

  Jesse had seen the rooms of the dying. He’d sat vigil with Nell at her mother’s bedside when cancer stripped the flesh from her bones and left her hollow-eyed and impossibly frail. Pressed against her soiled sheets, she’d looked more like a stick-figure drawing than the flesh-and-blood woman whose laughter shook the floor of any room she stood in.

  In the downstairs study, Jesse discovered a drawer containing the birth certificate of a child. Stephen James Kaiser, born on December 13, 1927. In another drawer he found a wedding certificate and a black-and-white photograph of a striking dark-haired woman in a long white gown. Her husband was tall with pale eyes and a half-smile as he gazed at his bride.

  The more he searched; the more unnerved Jesse became.

  Stock certificates, medical records, letters and photographs. Little by little, the study revealed the seemingly charmed life of the Kaiser family.

  And every discovery posed the question: who left behind such things?

  In the long, slim drawer in the center of the desk, his index finger jammed against something hard. He reached deeper and retrieved a small pistol. Behind the pistol, he felt a fat envelope.

  The envelope contained a stack of twenty-dollar bills as thick as a deck of playing cards.

  Jesse slid the envelope and gun back into the drawer, stood slowly, and walked out the front door. He sat on the top step of the house.

  Paint peeled in curls off the porch. Vines crawled over the railing and onto the roof.

  The Kaisers had left everything behind.

  Gordon and Adele Kaiser, and their teenage son, Stephen, had simply vanished.

  The money made Jesse uneasy.

  Money, like all good things, seemed to invite bad luck. Anytime his father won a poker game or found a job with a decent wage, misfortune soon followed.

  Jesse remembered the night his dad walked away from a game with fifty dollars, a veritable fortune for the father and son. They’d barely walked a block when two young men, one holding a pipe, jumped from behind a dumpster and demanded the cash.

  Jesse’s dad, too drunk to know better, took a swing at one of the guys. The second guy cracked Jesse’s dad across the back with the pipe, snatched the money from his pocket, and both men disappeared. Jesse had been ten. He hadn’t tried to fight for his dad. He’d stood and cried, snot and tears pouring down his face, until he found enough sense to run for help. Later, Jesse’s dad would joke that they lost fifty bucks, but won two free nights at the Stick-em and Prick-em Motel with a pretty nurse named Mallory, who snagged extra puddings for Jesse.

  Jesse learned not to trust money.

  Nell poked fun at him for his superstitions. When she found a two-dollar bill on the sidewalk after they’d gone to see a picture show, he insisted she turn it into the ticket window. At first, she applauded his moral studiousness, but when he explained his fear that something bad would befall them, she’d only laughed and said, ‘Yeah, we could have gotten fat on French fries and cokes.’

  The money, coupled with the abandoned house, only confirmed his fears.

  Something terrible had befallen the Kaiser family, who once upon a time, appeared to have it all.

  * * *

  After a long walk, Jesse returned to the house and showered.

  He would take enough money to travel south, rent a room, and start pretending to be alive again. The money made his stomach knot, but he wouldn’t take more than necessary.

  So what if God punished him for his avarice? Let God’s wrath come; Jesse wanted nothing more than to give him a piece of his mind.

  He cringed at his thoughts.

  “Sorry, Nell,” he murmured. “But your God abandoned you, and I’m sick of prostrating myself before the bastard.”

  He toweled off and started up the stairs to the third-floor bedroom, the young man’s room.

  A rancid odor invaded his nostrils, and he flinched. It smelled like something dead and spoiled. Cupping a hand over his nose and mouth, Jesse hurried to the second floor.

  An animal must have gotten into the house, maybe dragged a carcass in with it.

  The smell seemed to come from the guest bedroom. He pushed the door in, and the odor overwhelmed him.

  His eyes watered and he pulled the towel from his waist, stuffing it over his nose.

  The room appeared empty, but Jesse looked beneath the bed anyway.

  When the towel slipped down, Jesse sniffed.

  The smell was gone.

  He took a long inhalation through his nose, walking through the room and searching for the origin of the scent, but the room looked exactly as it had the day before when he’d napped on the bed.

  He shook his head, puzzled, and returned to the hall to trek up to the third floor. As he stepped into the third-floor hall, the smell returned, worse than before, like something left to rot and decay in the hot sun.

  Jesse gagged and turned for the bathroom. He plugged his nose and steadied his hand against the wall, willing his gag reflex down. When the desire to throw-up passed, he crept back toward the bedroom.

  The animal was surely in there, and somehow the scent had seeped down into the room beneath it.

  He kicked the door open with his naked foot, ready to hop back if an animal came barreling out.

  The room was still and quiet. The only sound, the hinge creaking on the still-swinging door.

  He stepped inside, eyes darting into the shadows.

  He released his nose for an instant, recoiling at the overpowering stench.

  It seemed to emanate from the closet, but the closet door was closed.

  Jesse hurried to a window, wrenched back the curtains, and pulled the window up with a screech of protest.

  He stuck his head through the open window and gulped the warm air.

  Reluctantly, he ducked his head back inside, covering his nose and stepping to the closet.

  He pulled the closet door open and waited.

  Nothing scurried out. Nothing moved at all.

  When Jesse released his nose again, the smell had vanished.

  Chapter 16

  August 1945

  Liv

  “George taught me,” Liv explained, closing her eyes and reaching deep into the cool mud at the pond’s edge.

  “Liv, who is George, really? I know you say he’s your uncle, but I get the feeling that’s not the whole truth,” Stephen said.

  She continued to sink her hands into the mud, allowing her fingers to brush over stones and twigs.

  She cracked an eye open and grinned.

  “Got one.” She pulled out a long purple-black earthworm.

  “A plump little fella,” Stephen said, nodding his approval.

  “George is my father,” she told him, standing and wringing her hands to flick the mud off.

  Stephen’s mouth fell open.

  “Your father? But I thought your father died.”

  “My brothers’ father is dead. Everyone believed he was my father too. The timing was close enough, and people never asked que
stions.” Liv told Stephen the secret as if she did it all the time. In truth, she’d never told another living soul. Her mother and George were the only two in the world who knew of her true parentage.

  “So, your mom had an affair?” he asked.

  Liv shook her head.

  “Never. She loved Mark, her first husband, but he went away and got killed. She says that George seduced her. It happened only days after she discovered my dad had died. She met George in the Stoneroot Forest. She was crying, hiding from her young sons. He took her back to his cabin, and three months later she found out she was pregnant.”

  “Your mom told you all that?”

  Liv nodded.

  “She feels guilty. She thinks she ruined my life. Everyone in town believed I was Mark’s child, and she never intended to tell George I existed, but a few months before my birth, he arrived at my mother’s house. George knew she’d conceived a child. He knew when he found her in the forest that day that she would be the mother of his child. He didn’t care what my mother told people, so long as he could see me and spend time with me. In the beginning she fought him, but he… he has a way with people.”

  “And how do you feel about George?” Stephen asked, reaching his hand into the mud she’d pulled the worm from.

  Liv smiled and imagined the man who’d given her half of who she was.

  “I don’t know a world without him. He’s not like most fathers.”

  Stephen nodded, drew his hand out empty and frowned.

  “I gathered as much.”

  “He’s more like a teacher,” Liv continued. “He tells me stories of the old ways. His people came from Scandinavia. He says there’s magic in our blood.”

  “And that’s why you can do the drum thing?”

  “I think so.” Liv thought of the other things, countless things she’d experienced with George.

  She held up the hag stone.

  “I see things when I look through this that other people can’t see. I also dream. Sometimes I dream the future. Other times, I dream as if I’m inside an animal. Though that usually comes after I eat a heart.”