Liv’s mother didn’t speak and did not acknowledge the gift box other than with a flick of her eye. She pulled away from her daughter and studied her. Liv felt as if the night before was plain on her face.
Her mother did not ask.
“There’s warm water in the basin. Best wash your face and go to bed.”
Liv did as she was told.
When she crawled into bed next to her sister, she watched the rise and fall of the little girl's chest as she breathed. She wanted to curl around her and inhale the scent of her tangled hair.
Instead, she lay in the early light beginning to filter through the window and thought of Stephen.
Chapter 36
September 1965
Liv
Liv sat on the stiff white hospital bed. She wrapped a sheet over the bowl Kaiser had delivered her stew in that evening. She’d dumped the meal into her bedpan, knowing if she ate it, she’d be unable to perform the tasks that lay ahead. She cinched the fabric beneath the bowl, knotting and pulling it tight.
She rested the bowl in her lap, closed her eyes and began to lightly drum on the fabric. The sound was soft, muffled, nothing like the drums from her childhood with George, but she knew what mattered most of all when calling in the spirits - a clear intention, a voice so filled with purpose it could cross the barriers between the living and the dead.
Though it was not the spirits of the dead she sought that night, but the spirit of a cat.
She hummed low, and beat her makeshift drum.
Rhythmically she began to rock back and forth. Eyes half-closed, Liv watched the room slide in and out of focus, until finally it slipped away like water cascading over a cliff.
On the fringes of a trance, Liv gazed into the moonlit forest that surrounded Stephen Kaiser’s childhood home.
The house filled her with dread, but she slid by the windows, like accusing eyes, and followed the scent of the animal she sought. She found her crouched in a bush, watching a field mouse who shivered in a crevice within the bark of a fallen tree.
“Kǫttr,” she called to the cat.
The cat’s ears pricked and a shiver ran along her spine. Her silken black fur rose in a sinewy spike from nape to tail.
The spirit of the cat listened, and when Liv moved into the animal, the spirit shifted and made room for her.
They ran through the cold high grass, the wet flicking against her whiskers. Up the porch, a swift, smooth jump carried her to the first eave. They scampered to the highest roof and there beneath an overhang, the cat squirmed into a hole in the abandoned house. On the pads of her hardened feet, she landed in the attic, nudged open the door with her nose and trotted to the floor below.
Stephen’s door stood ajar, and the cat slipped inside.
* * *
Jesse
Jesse sat in the dark kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug of tea. Overhead, a door creaked. He held the drink tighter, willing the sound away.
He didn’t want to follow the sound and see what apparition waited for him upstairs.
When another door creaked, he forced himself out of his chair.
He took the steps two at a time to the third floor, not bothering to hide his presence. If he crept slowly, the fear would have crippled him.
The door to the closet stood open, and a shaft of moonlight lit the open trunk.
A movement startled him and he jumped back, bumping the bedside table. He waited for the hand to reach out.
Instead, a coal-black cat bounded from the trunk.
In its mouth, Jesse saw a small bone.
“No,” he muttered, taking a step toward the cat. But he stopped as the cat lifted its gaze to his.
Its eyes were uncannily human. He almost expected the cat to open its mouth and speak.
It didn’t, but darted passed him and out the door.
He did not chase it, but followed it into the hallway.
He thought he heard the patter its feet overhead, but couldn’t be sure.
When he returned to the room, he gazed at the trunk, guilt-ridden that he hadn’t done better to protect the body inside it.
“I’ve done a lot wrong in my life,” he said. “But maybe I can do right by you, Veronica. Maybe I can bring you home to your momma and brother.”
He closed the bedroom door and walked down the stairs, calmer than he’d been in days.
He had options. If he called the police, they’d find the body, check the teeth or whatever they did to match her to the missing girl. Veronica’s family could bury their daughter in the plot next to her father. It was the right thing to do, but once he’d done that, it was over. His search, the house, his purpose.
He wanted to follow it first, see if he could give them more than the body. Maybe he could give them the killer, too.
He believed Liv was his key, the daughter of the man from the Stoneroot Forest.
If anyone could find her, it was George Corey.
* * *
Liv
Liv stayed with the cat as she darted through the forest, leaping over decayed logs and scampering up trees if something rustled close by.
When she reached Spellway Road, Liv urged the cat to slow and wait. The better part of the night had passed and dawn crested the horizon before a pick-up truck headed for Traverse City slid into view. Liv felt the cat’s pace quicken as the truck slowed at a stop sign. The cat ran and sprang into the bed of the truck, slithering between two barrels. She laid down, panting, and rested the bone on her forelegs.
Liv pulled her spirit from the animal.
Slowly, as if she drifted on a wave, she rolled back into her own body. The bowl rested beneath her fingers and she slid it aside, reclining on the bed. Though she hadn’t so much as taken a step, she was exhausted. Sweat ran along her brow and the rapid beat of the cat’s heart seemed to flutter beneath her ribs.
She closed her eyes and willed her body to sleep.
Chapter 37
September 1965
Liv
The day passed in quiet anticipation.
Liv heard the hospital abuzz with patients and doctors, nurses and orderlies rushing about. She imagined plucking off the roof and watching them scurrying up and down the hallways.
The room contained no windows.
Stephen had left a lamp lit by the door. It cast streaks of light on the white plaster walls.
In the tile floor, she saw a drain and noticed a clump of something dark — hair, she thought, cringing.
When Stephen finally lumbered into the room, Liv knew the sun had set over the dense asylum forest.
Sweat rolled down his face and soaked his collar. His black hair was mussed, his face unshaven, and she smelled him from across the room. It was not merely that he’d skipped his shower that morning. His body knew what his mind refused to accept: he was in danger, fight or flight was at hand. But Stephen forged on, refusing, or perhaps incapable, of knowing when to stop.
“You don’t look well, Stephen,” Liv murmured, but he seemed not to hear her.
He dug a photo from a leather bag, and then picked up a straitjacket with his free hand.
“Look,” he commanded, thrusting the photo in Liv’s face.
Liv gazed at a young woman and two small girls — sisters, she thought, based on their matching Christmas dresses.
“Who are…” but she didn’t finish. As she gazed at the girl’s mother with her soft blonde curls framing her heart-shaped face, she knew. Arlene. Her own baby sister, now grown into a woman and a mother.
“That’s right,” Stephen nodded. “Take a good look. You fight me,” he held up the straightjacket, “and I’m going for them next, Liv. Understand? You know I’ll do it.”
Liv pressed her lips together and nodded.
She had not intended to fight him.
His demise would come from within.
* * *
Mack
Mack slipped from the behind the willow, stealthily avoiding twigs and dried leaves as he crept behi
nd Stephen Kaiser.
Liv had spotted him. He saw her eyes widen slightly.
As Dr. Kaiser fumbled with a wall of brush, she mouthed the words ‘not yet’ at Mack.
He nodded and hung back, watching curiously as a dark hole opened in the foliage. A secret door lay within the bushes.
As Kaiser pushed Liv, bound by the straightjacket, ahead of him into a dark hallway, Mack sprang to the doorway and shoved a stick in the opening before it closed.
The heavy door slid shut, and for a moment Mack though the stick would snap and Liv would disappear into the darkness. Somehow it held.
* * *
Liv
“I thought I had to keep you alive. All this time,” Stephen laughed. “But if you’re… if you’re gone, Liv. The nightmares will be gone and the voices and the… the…” He stopped, hands braced on the table, breathing hard.
She could see the outline of his ribs through his sweat-stained shirt.
“Shut up,” he screamed suddenly, head jerking up as he spun around and flung a hand out as if to grab something that wasn’t there.
“Who haunts you, Stephen?”
He continued to gaze feverishly at the emptiness before him, and then he turned and glared at her.
“You,” he hissed.
Stephen took a while to gather himself, but soon he bustled around the room, focused. Liv watched him open a plastic crate.
He lifted out the corpse of a large muskrat. The rotted body released a noxious stench, and Liv closed her eyes and looked away.
“The spell called for an otter, but this is close. It’s close enough,” he mumbled to himself.
He laid the carcass on a wooden table he’d arranged with other things: candles, feathers, a series of stones, and a jar of blood.
“And let’s not forget this,” he uttered.
He turned to face Liv and lifted the poison ring. She knew he’d taken it. She’d left it for him to find.
“She used to threaten me with this,” he said, turning the ring back and forth. The ruby glittered in the firelight. “Open your mouth, she’d scream, and I did it. A hundred times I must have opened my mouth and waited for her to dump the poison in. After a time, I wanted her to. Once, I even dared her.” A hollow, angry laugh erupted from him. “She left the room and came back a moment later. Told me again to open my mouth. I did, and she poured the powder in.”
Stephen lowered the ring, glaring at it.
“What happened?” Liv asked, unable to forget that long-ago boy she had loved, unable to cut off her pity for the man he’d become.
“It was borax,” he whispered. A look of disgust pressed his features ugly, and he licked his lips as if something bitter coated his tongue. “She’d taken the poison out and replaced it with laundry soap. I spit it out, and she slapped me. Told me to clean the carpet where I’d spit. And then I spent two nights in the cellar.”
As he spoke, his back curved, his shoulders hunching forward as if trying to protect the heart within his chest. Though it was too late for that now. All the good had gone from him.
As she gazed at Stephen’s crude altar, the blood of his animal sacrifice splashed across the rough-hewn wood, she understood his intention. She would be his final sacrifice. He mistakenly believed he’d access the power of the chamber by taking her life.
Sweat rolled down his face as he worked, muttering under his breath, dabbing his fingers into the blood and wiping it across his forehead and then pressing it to his lips.
She watched him with detached awe, and she hardly felt her feet pressed into the cold stone floor or her arms secured to her body by the straightjacket.
The energy in the chamber shifted with Stephen and she thought, yes, it yearned for the sacrifice as well. Whatever the spirit of the place had once been, it had become a mouth hungry for suffering and death.
George had told her of such places, places where ancient people went to satisfy the spirits with sacrificial offerings. Places that later grew overgrown and derelict after the people realized that feeding it only made it hungrier and more powerful.
“Stephen, what happened to George?” she asked.
He intended to kill her. He no longer had to keep his silence.
He blinked down at the altar, lifting a stone and then shaking his head and replacing it. When he looked up, his expression was flat and cold.
“George,” he said stretching the syllable out long. “George died. Your precious George,” he muttered. “He hated me; you know?”
Liv did know.
“Is that why you killed him?”
“Ha,” Stephen laughed and looked at her, incredulous. “I’m not an animal, Liv.”
He flipped through a book. It was not one of George’s spell books, but Liv could see the symbols within it were surprisingly similar.
“Where did you get that, Stephen?”
“I didn’t take it from George,” Stephen snapped. “Though if you want the truth, I intended to. I intended to take the stones and the books, all the magic he withheld from me, and you. He kept it from you too, Liv. This,” he slapped a bloody palm on the book. “I bought from a man in Iceland. I went there a year ago. I was dreaming these symbols, Liv. Your and George’s staves, or whatever you called them. But even after I got the book, I couldn’t stop thinking of the hag stones. I needed them. To do this magic, I needed the stones.”
“So, you killed George for a pile of stones you could have found on the bank of a river?”
He glared at her and spat on the floor.
He looked at the spit, horrified.
“My tooth,” he shrieked, dropping to the ground.
Liv gazed at the clear spittle. There was no tooth.
Stephen picked up a stone and held it out, accusingly.
“You did this! You and your black powder and your black magic!”
He threw the stone across the room and climbed to his feet.
“I went to the Stoneroot Forest and George tricked me. ‘Come with me, Stephen. I’ll take you to my cabin,’ he said. But he didn’t. He led me deeper and deeper into the woods until I was lost, and then he… he disappeared.” Stephen clutched his head, as if the thoughts were trying to escape. “He appeared and then disappeared over and over until I didn’t know if I was dreaming, imagining him. And then I was holding a knife. I don’t even know where it came from, and the next time he appeared, I plunged it into his heart.”
Liv listened to the story numbly. George had lured Stephen to the cabin. He’d intended for Stephen to kill him.
“Damn you, George,” she mumbled.
Stephen looked up at her sharply.
His eyes watered and ran. He was not crying tears of sadness, but tears of desperation.
He touched a finger to his cheek and howled, rubbing at his cheeks with both hands.
“Blood, there’s blood coming from my eyes.”
But there was no blood.
In the darkened corridor, Liv saw Mack. He held a large rock in his hand.
He waited until Stephen turned back to the altar.
Liv nodded, and he raced into the room.
Stephen barely had time to straighten when Mack crashed the rock into the back of his head. Stephen went down on his knees and fell forward, thumping against the table and falling to the floor.
Mack stared dumbfounded at the crumpled doctor.
“Release me,” she commanded Mack. “Don’t worry, I can feel him. He’s still alive.”
Mack undid her straps.
Liv grabbed the poison ring from the altar and followed Mack down the tunnel.
Around her, the whispers called her back.
Stay, they seemed to say. Stay for a little while longer.
She slowed and stopped, bracing a hand against the damp stone wall.
Mack turned.
“What are you doing?” he asked, and then as if seeing something in her face, he grabbed her hand and pulled her forward into the cool night.
Once out of the chamb
er, her legs seemed to function again. Some of the fog in her mind abated.
“There,” Liv exclaimed, pointing at the black cat who stood at the base of the willow, watching them. She took the bone sitting near the cat’s paws and slipped the poison ring over it.
Digging quickly, she stuffed the finger and ring into a shallow hole and threw dirt upon it.
“Liv,” Mack yelled, and she looked up as Stephen raced from the chamber, a knife clutched in his hand.
Mack dove in front of her, and Liv screamed as the blade sank into his chest.
The cat screeched and jumped onto Stephen’s back. He shrieked and tried to wrench it free, but its claws were lodged deep in his shoulder.
“Volva,” George’s voice floated across the forest. The sound had emerged from dark grove of leafy trees.
Liv helped Mack, limping and clutching his bleeding chest, toward the trees.
A thick mist began to rise from the ground. Soon their feet and ankles were obscured, and then their legs.
Liv heard Stephen searching for them, cursing and tearing at the brambles.
They slipped deeper into the woods and soon Stephen’s shouts were drowned by the forest.
“My truck’s in the parking lot,” Mack wheezed gesturing forward.
Somehow they made it to the blue pick-up truck with a partially peeled bumper sticker on the rear fender that read ‘I’ve got Detroit Tiger Fever,’ next to a goofy cartoon tiger. Mack struggled into the passenger seat.
“Keys are under the rug,” he muttered, gesturing at the floor.
Liv pulled the keys out, stuffed them in the ignition and roared from the parking lot. The truck fishtailed as they turned onto the road that led them away from the asylum. Liv did not have a driver’s license.
Mack glanced at her, his face slick and pale.
“You okay?” he mumbled.
Liv gritted her teeth and nodded. She wasn’t a good driver. She’d only driven a handful of times in her life mostly with her mother on the rare occasion they borrowed someone’s vehicle.
Dead Stream Curse: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 23
