Calling Back the Dead: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Corrie?” Sarah spoke from the doorway and her voice trembled.

  She’d pulled me from the lake but I’d hardly seen her since she peeled off my soaking clothes and left me in a heap near the fire. She still wore her construction woman costume. Black mascara rimmed her puffy red eyes, and she’d pulled her hank of blonde hair into a messy ponytail.

  I swallowed and forced my legs to work as I stood and opened my arms for Sarah, for Sammy’s twin. She rushed into me and burst into tears. My own tears returned with a force that threatened to pull us both under, sweep us into the great big lake beyond the window.

  “He’s dead,” she murmured, as if it took the police and the paramedics and this troupe of experts to confirm what she’d known the instant she saw him.

  I couldn’t say it out loud. I nodded into her shoulder, grumbled a muffled affirmation, and then sank from her arms onto the floor. I could not be strong for Sarah. I had no strength left, no bones either, nothing of substance. I was a puddle of nothing and wished to dissolve into the cracks beneath me.

  “What happened?” Sarah demanded, and I knew she’d turned her gaze to the detective now.

  I laid my head on the floor and closed my eyes.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I didn’t get your name…”

  “I’m Sarah Flynn, Sammy’s twin sister. I called the police.”

  Twin - they always said twin - never ‘this is my sister or brother,’ but always my twin. I asked Sammy why one time, and he said, ‘How could I leave out the most important part?’

  “I’m genuinely sorry for your loss, Sarah. I’m Detective Collins. Were you at the party tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you sit with me and answer a few questions?”

  “Yes but…” She trailed off, and I imagined her staring down at me - strong Sarah. She could not sit and answer questions as I lay on the floor. I wanted to reassure her it didn’t matter where I was. Nothing mattered now. In fact, the floor was preferable to some comfortable place that would make Sammy’s absence more stark, more true.

  “Let’s get you onto the couch,” Sarah said, crouching beside me.

  “Here, let me,” the detective urged. “Corrie, do you mind if I lift you?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  Strong hands slipped behind by back and beneath my knees, scooping me from the floor. He deposited me on the couch. Sarah tucked a blanket around me, but I could not look at her. I rolled to face the sofa and stuffed the blanket into my mouth, biting down, suppressing the screams and sobs battling for release.

  “Can we give her something?” Sarah asked. “I have a sedative in my bag.”

  The detective paused for a long time, and then finally said yes.

  She slipped the pill into my mouth and I didn’t bother swallowing it. I let it dissolve, bitter on my tongue, grainy when it slid down my throat.

  Sarah

  * * *

  SARAH PACED AWAY from the detective. Her heart hurt and her mind felt foggy from the shots of tequila she’d been drinking only hours before.

  “Tell me what happened when you found Sammy and Corrie,” the detective started.

  Sarah put an unconscious hand to her heart. It was still beating. Sammy’s was not, but somehow hers was.

  “I came back around four-thirty in the morning. I’d forgotten my phone here at the house. We were all drinking last night, and I forgot it.”

  “At four-thirty in the morning, you drove all the way back to Kerry Manor for your phone?”

  Sarah frowned and nodded.

  “Yes, I - the morning after Halloween we always have an early breakfast. It’s a tradition. I met someone last night, and I was excited. I never went to bed. After she left, I decided to come back.”

  “She?” the detective asked.

  Sarah felt a familiar flair of aggravation at his question.

  “Yes, she, I’m gay. Is that relevant?”

  The detective did not blush, the typical reaction when she announced her sexual preference.

  “Everything is relevant,” he said. “You drove home with a date and returned at four-thirty a.m. to have breakfast. What time did you leave here?”

  “A little after one in the morning.”

  “Were there still a lot of people at the party?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “No, maybe ten people still milling about, but I figured everyone would leave soon.”

  “And you returned at four-thirty. Did you call first?”

  “No, I didn’t call first. I realized when I got home, I forgot my phone. I tried to sleep for an hour, but I was wired so I got up. I…” Sarah paused.

  “Leave nothing out. It’s impossible to say what might be helpful at this point.”

  “I had a weird feeling while I was trying to sleep. I might have dozed for a minute and then, I don’t know. I sat bolt upright in bed and needed to come back to Kerry Manor.”

  “You had a weird feeling?”

  Sarah rubbed her temples. Exhaustion seeped in, blurring the edges of her vision.

  “Sammy and I were connected. We were twins. As children, we shared feelings sometimes. I can’t explain it to you, but I think that’s what it was. I think I sensed something had happened to Sammy.”

  “So, you came back to check on Sammy?”

  “No. I mean, I had a weird feeling, but it wasn’t like I realized something bad had happened to him. I was coming back anyway, and I knew I’d never fall back asleep. When I got here, there were lights on, but everyone had gone home. I ran upstairs to wake them up.”

  “You intended to wake them up at four-thirty in the morning after you guys had been partying all night?”

  Sarah rolled her eyes.

  “Yes. He’s my twin brother, my best friend, and Corrie comes in a close second. They’re my best friends. It’s not unusual for me to do that.”

  “Okay, and then what happened?”

  “Their bed was empty. I figured they passed out in the great room in front of the fireplace. But that room was empty too. In the kitchen there were rags by the sink, bloody rags.”

  The detective nodded.

  “Did you touch them?”

  Sarah squinted, trying to remember. Had she touched them?

  “I don’t think so. I looked at them and then looked through the kitchen window. The moon illuminated something in the lake, something big and white. I walked onto the porch trying to see it, and then I realized I was looking at Corrie.”

  “Corrie was floating in the lake?”

  “Yes.”

  “Face down?”

  “Yes. I ran to the water, but before I got there, I saw…” She saw him again. Sammy, lying beneath the oak tree, his face gray, his clothes a puzzle of dark splotches. Blood - she hadn’t quite known it in that moment, but yes, it was blood.

  “Sammy,” she breathed, clutching her shirt and twisting it in her hand as if that might ease the tightness in her chest.

  “Did you go to him?”

  “I started to and then stopped, because I knew.” She paused and forced the words out in a burst. “I knew he was dead.”

  “How?”

  She blinked at the detective, angry that he’d forced her to relive a moment she wanted to forget.

  “His eyes. They were cloudy, and his body looked contorted, like he was frozen in place.”

  “Rigor mortis had already set in at four-thirty a.m.,” the detective murmured, writing in his notebook.

  “I walked into the lake and turned Corrie over. I thought she was dead too. The lake was freezing. Her body was so cold and heavy in her dress. I turned her over and dragged her to the beach. She spit up some water, and I carried her back into the house.”

  “Did you notice any injuries on Corrie?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “She was half-drowned. I didn’t exactly inspect her, but I helped her out of her dress. She just laid there shivering, her teeth chattering. I wrapped
her in a blanket and called the police.”

  “Did she say that someone attacked them? Her and Sammy?”

  “No. I think I asked her, or I asked what happened. She didn’t know. She woke up and found Sammy dead.”

  “She went into the lake on her own, then?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “I think so. She was overcome with grief.”

  The detective nodded, flipping a page in his notebook.

  “I asked Corrie if there were any strangers at the party and she didn’t seem to know.”

  “There were a lot of people,” Sarah said.

  “But anyone out of place? I can’t stress enough how important these next few hours are, Sarah.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” she snapped, bracing her hands on the edge of the counter.

  The detective sat back.

  “I understand you’re in shock and you’re in grief, but try to allow your mind to wander back. Return to the party. Did you get a bad feeling about anyone? Did you see Sammy arguing with anyone?”

  Sarah sat heavily in a chair and took a deep breath. She tried to push the pain surrounding Sammy off to the side as she returned to the party. Had anything unusual happened? Anything that foretold the horror that lay ahead?

  She shook her head as the memories rolled past. She remembered Sammy in his Total Recall costume, weird dead alien baby hanging from his stomach, standing at a long, cobwebbed-draped table and talking animatedly with a group of men as he popped appetizers in his mouth. She glimpsed him on the porch with Corrie, laughing and holding his arms out as if shocked at how many people had come to the party. She recalled him dancing in the great room to Michael Jackson’s, Thriller, but he looked rather drunk and fell twice.

  “There’s nothing, Detective. Nothing that sticks out. It was typical Sammy. He was laughing and happy, and everyone he came into contact with shared his expression. There were no fights, no evil men lurking in the shadows. I mean, unless you consider a hundred people dressed as monsters and zombies sinister.”

  The detective smiled.

  “I can imagine picking out the bad guys in such a group is challenging. Let’s take a different approach,” he said. “I need a list of everyone at the party. Just start listing names. I hope to contact everyone who attended within forty-eight hours. Between you and Corrie, perhaps we can get the majority identified.”

  Sarah glanced at Corrie and doubted she’d be much help.

  “Hold on,” Sarah said. She jumped from her chair and hurried into the kitchen, where men in uniform moved meticulously through the room dusting for fingerprints. Sammy’s black leather planner was sealed in a plastic bag.

  She returned to the great room.

  “There’s a black planner in the kitchen. It looks like it’s already been put in an evidence bag. Sammy will have a list in there with phone numbers and emails. That won’t cover everyone, but it will come close. The other guests will be friends of guests or people who tagged along. I won’t have all those names, and neither will Corrie. You’ll have to get them from the guests themselves.”

  “Okay,” he nodded, writing in his notebook. “Let me also ask you this. Why were Sammy and Corrie living in this house? I admit it surprised me when the call came in.”

  “A man named Dane Lucas renovated it. He does restorations, and stumbled upon this house during a summer vacation. Two years ago, he started restoring it. He knows Sammy through some Gothic house group online. The man offered to let Sammy rent it for the winter. He was traveling out of the country and needed someone he trusted to move in and make sure everything functioned. Sammy jumped at the chance.”

  Detective Collins frowned, an expression that added ten years to his boyish face.

  “And Sammy was aware a family had died in this house a century ago?”

  “Yes, unfortunately, Sammy loved creepy stuff. He wrote horror comics for a living.” Sarah paused, putting a hand on her chest. Each time she spoke of Sammy, it was in the past tense. How could that be?

  “Are you okay, Miss Flynn?”

  Sarah nodded, and then shook her head.

  “I have to call my mom,” she started. “No, I have to go to her house. She’s watching Isis. I need to take Corrie with me.”

  “Who’s Isis?”

  “Corrie and Sammy’s two-year-old.”

  The detective looked sad for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Write down your cell phone number and expect to hear from me.”

  CORRIE

  * * *

  I KNEW he wasn’t gone. I knew it even as I watched the sheen slide from his eyes and vanish into the shadows beneath the great oak tree. I knew it before he first whispered into my ear, only hours after his death as I sat trembling in the claw-footed bathtub at his mother’s house staring at the pink and black water swirling around me, and the gleam from the iridescent bath bubbles scented with vanilla caramel.

  “Gorey.”

  I jerked my head so hard, I strained a muscle in my neck. It was a sick pet name. At least, Sarah called it sick, but I liked the nickname. Sammy was a horror buff. It made sense that he called me Gorey and Morticia and even Carrie White, but he saved that last one for my especially difficult PMS weeks. He made sure to remind me to “plug it up” during those emotional meltdowns, which always got a laugh and a much-needed decompression for me. Sammy had a gift. No matter how angry I became, he knew how to bring me back to sanity. He joked a lot, but never out of cruelty. He seemed to tap into a cosmic timeline that pinged him at the exact moment a little humor might deflate the monster within me.

  So, when I heard Sammy whisper “Gorey” into my ear in his sweet, lilting way, I didn’t cry out in fear. I closed my eyes, leaned my head back against the hard lip of the bathtub, and smiled.

  “I knew you wouldn’t leave,” I told him.

  How could I remember the final look in his eyes, you might ask? His last breath? And to that, I am silent. Because I don’t know. How can I have no memory of the night after I fell asleep and simultaneously have that memory, that single image captured as if by a photo and printed on my brain, so I must look at it again and again and worse, I must question what it means. How could I have been there if someone else killed him?

  CHAPTER 4

  Now

  Corrie

  I stood near the back of the room. The temperature, cool when I walked in, had grown stifling. My black dress clung to my skin, growing sticky with sweat, the neckline too tight. A line of people in dark suits and dark dresses blocked the shining coffin, but I sensed it hunched in the front of the funeral parlor. A void seemed to exist there, a black hole of indescribable emptiness. Sammy, larger than life, could never occupy such a space.

  Three days that encapsulated a lifetime had transpired since Halloween night. Moments drifted in and out of my thoughts. The anguished cry of Sammy’s mother when Sarah broke the news. The sound of Isis’s laughter, foreign and heartbreaking in the silent house of my dead husband’s mom. Sarah trying to force-feed me oatmeal as I lay in bed with my teeth clamped shut. I had become like a child, worse than a child. My own daughter would open her damn mouth and eat. I refused even basic life-giving necessities and forced my sister-in-law to set aside her own grief and care for me.

  The guilt lay heavy, and yet I could not shrug off my anguish.

  A dreamlike quality descended over the scene. I watched people lose shape and merge into a single stream of black, pricked through with sallow skin and dark eyes.

  “Corrie?” The whisper stole through the cottony barrier that filled my ears. I turned and saw my sister, Amy, her hand outstretched, a series of rings glittering from her slender fingers.

  People stared. Their eyes devoured me.

  Sarah appeared on my other side. Amy’s and Sarah’s hands held me. I waited for them to grip hard, pull me toward the coffin, force me to gaze at the empty shell he used to live in. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t.

  I twisted away and pushed through the door, smack
ed into a hard man wearing a brown coat and black slacks. I slammed onto my butt.

  “Mrs. Flynn?” Detective Collins bent low, offered me his hand, and I took it if only to get up faster and escape.

  I didn’t look into his eyes, just brushed him aside and clicked toward the door, my stupid heels sounding vain and dramatic in the marble foyer. I burst through the doors and gulped the cold air, grasping the iron rail as my legs wobbled beneath me.

  People moved through the parking lot. Their eyes followed me. Someone broke from the group, but I turned quickly away, slipping behind the funeral home. I kicked off my shoes and crept into the garden, empty of flowers in November. A white swing hung in a gazebo and I sat down, and then curled onto my side, pulling my knees to my chest and weeping into my hands.

  “Shh… it’s okay.” I heard his voice and felt his hand on my back rubbing.

  Sammy gave the best back rubs.

  I didn’t dare look at him, nor lean into the sensation, because the moment I did, he would vanish.

  Sarah

  * * *

  SARAH SAT on the couch next to her mother, watching her tea grow cold. The guests had left, Corrie slept in a room upstairs, likely sedated, and Isis had gone to the hotel with Corrie’s sister.

  Archie, Sarah’s West Highland white terrier, lay in a little dog bed sleeping with one eye open as Corrie and Sammy’s cat, Dracula, stalked him from the hallway.

  A clock ticked from the kitchen, the cuckoo clock that Sarah and Sammy had loved as children. They would race to the kitchen every hour to watch the little Danish man and woman slide out in their wooden shoes for a kiss. If the clock chimed now, Sarah might scream or cry or cease exiting. She hoped it was one-fifteen or some middle hour that wouldn’t result in an overreaction to the damn clock.

  Her mother leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Her face looked ruddy, mascara streaked beneath her eyes, the pink lipstick long ago rubbed from her lips by kissing friends and family, hands and cheeks and lips.