Calling Back the Dead: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “I’ve got to take a walk, Mom,” she murmured and stood. She’d abandoned her signature white t-shirt and jeans for proper funeral clothes. Her black slacks were wrinkled, her matching black sweater too warm in the once-cozy, now claustrophobic house.

  She passed houses, trees, a little girl diving from her porch into a pile of multi-colored leaves, but she saw only one thing: Sammy, his face powdered and strange, staring up from a bed of dark satin.

  Had Sammy wanted a funeral? A burial? A polished mahogany casket and a trail of people looking into his dead face?

  Sarah wondered why she’d never thought to ask him. They’d had a thousand conversations, why not one of the most important of all?

  Corrie hadn’t known either, but then again, Corrie could barely take a sip of water without dropping the cup since Sammy’s death. For three days, she’d wandered in a fog of grief so heavy her mere presence in a room made it hard to breathe.

  It didn’t seem real, or possible, that Sammy had died.

  “Sammy,” she whispered and saw again his face, eyes pressed closed, his lashes long and dark as if they’d put mascara on them. Drained his body and pumped it full of chemicals, plastered on powder to hide what they were seeing - not Sammy, but a dead body that no longer contained Sammy at all.

  Beneath his suit, Corrie had provided a Werewolf in Paris t-shirt. Beneath that, his flesh was likely a mass of stab wounds. Did they bandage those?

  “Hi, Sarah.”

  Sarah jerked up at the sound of her name.

  Lisa Priss or Prim or something-or-other jogged by in neon purple leggings and a black all-weather jacket, her blonde curls piled on her head and her face heavily made up.

  Sarah gave a little wave and cut down a path that led into the trees. She didn’t want to chat with a woman from high school she barely remembered. Most of all, she didn’t want to explain all the cars in her mother’s driveway, all the long faces.

  Their freshman year of high school, Lisa had developed a crush on Sammy. She walked her yipping Chihuahua by their house at every opportunity. She wore ridiculous outfits like miniskirts and teeny-tiny jean shorts. Sarah and Sammy would dive to the floor when they saw her coming.

  “Blonde vampire passing in three-two-one,” Sammy would whisper, and then they’d crawl to the window and peek out as she glanced back at the house forty or fifty times, hoping for a glimpse of a boy who would never reciprocate her feelings.

  Lisa had bought her childhood home and now had a husband who did some kind of boring finance thing, and two kids or two dogs.

  “Tragically typical,” Sammy would have called her.

  “Will I ever stop hearing your voice in my head?” Sarah whispered, picking up speed as the forest trail sloped down toward a weedy pond.

  CHAPTER 5

  Then

  Corrie

  “C offee?” Sammy smiled and held out the chipped Everything Tastes Better with Cat Hair mug he offered me every morning. I took it, grateful, and slumped into the armchair facing the hard surface of the lake beyond. We had claimed the great room in Kerry Manor for the panoramic window the designer had installed. It wasn’t in line with the home’s original architecture, but he told Sammy he had to take a handful of allowances. How could you blot out the sweeping views of Lake Michigan?

  Other than the window, the room lived up to its Gothic beginnings. The vaulted ceiling comprised an intricacy of deep grooved wood rising to a ribbed pattern, ending at a dangling, tiered chandelier. Upholstered furniture in dark colors clustered around the room. Thick, burgundy curtains butted arched windows, which faced the courtyard.

  I had grown to love the hand-carved fireplace and the pagan figurehead in its center, which we referred to as Loki. Sammy had lined up several horror movie action figures across its ledge, including the Michigan Wolf Man, Freddy Krueger and something that resembled a half-man-half spider.

  I looked out the window and sipped my coffee, marveling at the changing landscape.

  October signaled the shift. In some divine orchestration, the whole earthly realm seemed to agree it was time to remodel the house. Green leaves melted into reds and gold. Orange wood lilies and opal trillium receded into the forest floor and took with them the vibrant green ferns and grass. Pumpkins appeared, stacked at the end of dirt driveways, and Indian corn lay in bushels on people’s doorsteps.

  Sammy loved October, and before the first leaves fell, he fantasized about Halloween costumes and rum-laced apple cider. He watched horror movies and insisted we add pumpkin pie spice to everything from chili to pancakes.

  Sarah once told me that Sammy was an October baby, though he was born in July. Since birth, Sammy had loved the full harvest moon, and the gold-flecked painter’s brush that turned down the world of color.

  As a boy, he painted the walls of his bedroom Halloween orange and began a collection of monster-face masks that would put a Halloween store to shame.

  At the age of ten, he nearly sent his mother to an early grave when he jumped from the attic one October morning wearing a devil’s mask. Poor Helen fell flat on her back, and Sammy’s dad whipped him with a belt for the first and only time in his young life. Sammy’s mother had told me the story half a dozen times, and claimed still to this day she didn’t like to open the attic door.

  In our house, Halloween trumped Christmas. We didn’t merely carve pumpkins, we carved a dozen, at least. Sammy took hours scouring pumpkin patches for the perfect ones - the bigger, the better. Halloween night involved a massive celebration. Last year, we road-tripped with Sarah to Salem, Massachusetts, and spent the evening attending a witch’s ball at a huge old church transformed into a dance club.

  This year, we would host a Halloween party at Kerry Manor.

  “Okay, we’re out of here, sweet cheeks,” Sammy told me, kissing my temple.

  I leaned down to hug Isis. She licked the side of my face and grinned.

  “Icky, Isis,” I said, wiping her slobber from my cheek.

  “See you in a few hours,” I told them.

  Sammy wrote comic books for a living, which left him ample time to lean over my shoulder and attempt to read my lines before I finished writing them. Fortunately, most days he packed up Isis and went into town to give me a reprieve. He rented a small office comprised of two rooms attached to the back of a boutique clothing store. In one room, Sammy covered the floor with craft paper. Isis could sit in a rainbow explosion of crayons and draw to her heart’s content. At two-years-old, she didn’t draw so much as scribble and occasionally eat a crayon. Toys and a small mounted television occupied her time when the coloring grew boring.

  I had abandoned my own office, a therapy practice I shared with a colleague, for what I termed a writing sabbatical. My clients had been recommended to other therapists, and I was fulfilling a lifelong dream of writing a novel.

  “Now, if only I could actually write it,” I muttered, deleting my last line and starting again.

  “One for sorrow, two for mirth…”

  The child’s rhyme, sung in a high, girlish voice, drifted through the house.

  I paused, blinking at the handful of words I’d just typed.

  I glanced toward the hall. Had Sammy and Isis returned? Certainly not. It took more than a half-hour to drive into Traverse City.

  I strained, listening, but the sound didn’t come again. Sammy’s mother loved to buy Isis toys that sang and talked. The previous Christmas, she gave her a cow that cackled madly when you pressed its foot. Apparently, she’d also given her one that sang creepy nursery rhymes - great.

  I returned my focus to the screen. My protagonist had just discovered her mother was dead. Writing the scene felt impossible. I thought of my own mother, her gaunt face against the white of the hospital pillow, her hair thinly arranged in a dark halo around her head.

  She needed a liver transplant, but alcoholics didn’t get liver transplants. They died instead.

  “Three for a funeral, four for a birth.” This time, a burst
of laughter followed the song.

  I sat up so quickly, my laptop plummeted to the floor.

  “Damn.”

  I got down on my knees. A small plastic chip had splintered from the side, but otherwise the computer remained intact.

  “Is someone there?” I called, stepping into the foyer.

  Sun slanted through the stained-glass window at the top of the stairs, but hardly enough to illuminate the darkness in every corner. I roamed from room to room, listening, waiting.

  I wandered into the kitchen, the bathroom, and lastly back to the stairs. I did not hear the child again.

  “Because there is no child,” I said out loud. The instant the words left my mouth, I paused, as if I’d offered a challenge and now the child would have to reveal herself.

  Silence greeted me.

  I searched every room, peeked beneath beds, which gave me a shiver or two, and decided Isis must have a horrible new toy I would dispose of when I came across it.

  I had only just settled back into my space on the couch when Sammy and Isis returned in a tornado of sound and movement.

  Isis tugged at the blanket wrapped around my feet and demanded cookies.

  “Lunch first,” Sammy announced, giving me a smack on the lips.

  I followed them into the kitchen.

  Sammy continued singing whatever rock song he’d been listening to in the car. He pulled the high chair from its cupboard and slopped sandwich fixings onto the counter.

  I stretched, grateful my little stream of chaos had returned to distract me from the blank screen.

  “Get some writing done?” Sammy asked, lifting a squealing Isis into her high chair. He gave her jarred peaches and half a turkey sandwich, and settled an array of toy figures on her tray.

  “Yeah,” I shrugged and gestured to the now-closed laptop I had set on the kitchen counter.

  “Good because there’s a zombie movie marathon happening in,” he looked at his watch, ”twenty-five minutes.”

  “Oh my, I didn’t realize it was a movie day.”

  He grinned.

  “This is the winter of our discontent. How better to while away the hours than watching zombie movies?”

  I cocked an eyebrow.

  “We could rake some of those leaves in the yard. In a week they’ll be waist-high.”

  “Leaves, schmeaves,” he grumbled. “Anyway, I bought some monster bags for the Halloween Party and we need leaves to fill them out. Best to put that off until the week before the party.”

  “How are your peaches, Honey Bear?” I asked Isis, kissing the top of her head.

  “Mmm-good,” she mumbled, chewing a mouthful of fruit and stomping a pink princess toward a group of unsuspecting penguins who were about to be knocked to the floor.

  I caught them as they fell and returned them to her tray.

  “Why hasn’t anyone invented a sling shot that catches falling toddler toys and returns them to their original spots? They’d make a fortune,” Sammy exclaimed.

  “Maybe I should do that instead of writing a book.”

  “No way,” he grinned, taking a bite of Isis’s sandwich. “You’ll see, Corrie. Next year at this time, we’re going to be sitting back and reading about Corrie Flynn, the New York Times Bestselling Author.”

  “I’d be happy if next year at this time, I had a rough draft,” I admitted, putting the bread and turkey back in the refrigerator.

  “You will,” he assured me.

  “I found a little room upstairs I might turn into a writer’s room. It has an old desk and a window that looks out on the courtyard,” I told him.

  “Ooh, tucked away clacking at the keys like Hemingway, huh?”

  “I’m pretty sure Hemingway managed more words in a day than I produce in a week.”

  “You’ll find your groove, babe.”

  Isis finished eating, and Sammy helped her down. She raced into the great room with her toys clutched in her hand. Sammy and I followed her.

  “Oh,” I said, remembering the child’s song. “Does Isis have a new toy that sings nursery rhymes?”

  Sammy plopped on the couch, wrinkling his brow.

  “My mom got her that little cat piano that sings.”

  I frowned.

  “I don’t think so,” I murmured.

  “Come snuggle with me,” Sammy said, patting the place beside him. “Zombies aren‘t the same if you’re not clutching me in terror whenever they feed on a new victim.”

  I SAT at the little wooden desk tucked into the alcove, the gray sky washed in gloomy darkness. The room lacked an overhead light, making up for it with antique lamps and sterling candlesticks. I lit candles, imagining the person, likely a man, who sat at a desk like this one-hundred years ago. I knew nothing of the Kerry family except a tragic fire stole most of their lives. Did he sit in this room and pen letters to his family? Tell them of the trials of life in northern Michigan and close his envelopes with a wax seal?

  “No,” I murmured, surveying the space. The man of the house would have done those things in the study. This room likely belonged to the mother. Perhaps a sewing table sat near the window, so she could watch her children play outside.

  The tiny black cursor blinked at me from the solid white screen of my laptop. Write, it seemed to say. Write… write… write.

  I stood and stretched, missing our cats for the first time since coming to Kerry Manor. Helen had taken them in. They would be fat when we retrieved them after months of eating tuna from the can. Each time we visited, I found them lazing in her sunroom, their bellies turned up and their eyes rolled back.

  When I first started my novel, both cats flocked to me as if they understood the absolute necessity of a cat to a writer. They would curl on my lap, on a stack of books perched near my desk, or on the windowsill in my writing room, which doubled as a guest bedroom. That, however, existed in our actual home - a little bungalow in Traverse City. Kerry Manor was off-limits to pets.

  “Maybe that’s why I’m blocked,” I mumbled. “I don’t have my furry muses.”

  I walked around the room, sliding my hand over furniture, looking closer at the neat grooves in the old wood. This room was far from where the fire had occurred and likely contained all of its original wood. A small closet, only waist-high and pointed at the top, adorned one wall. I pulled on the little iron handle, but it didn’t budge. Perhaps a veneer had been put on the wood, causing the door to stick. I tried a second time. The door began to open and then was wrenched back - as if someone who sat on the other side had pulled it closed.

  I took my hand away and stared at the door.

  Only a child could sit comfortably in such a closet, and Isis was not in the house. I was alone.

  “Don’t be silly,” I whispered, echoing a sentiment my older sister told me when I crept into her bed late at night during our younger years. I had often woken from nightmares, and I would have liked to crawl into bed with my mother. Unfortunately, most nights she drank until she passed out on the couch. If I did go to her, her skin would be slick and pungent. She’d swat me away as if I were a giant mosquito attacking in her sleep.

  My sister was a much safer option.

  I gripped the handle and pulled, but it didn’t budge. I folded my hand into a fist and knocked.

  Silence.

  Shaking my head at my misgivings, I stood and returned to the desk.

  As I started to sit in my chair, a knock sounded behind me, small and hollow. Just one.

  The silence that followed had substance. It crowded the space, pressing in until even air seemed hard to come by.

  I had not moved. My hand stood poised over the back of my chair, my head slightly rotated toward that little door, my ears straining to hear.

  I lifted one leaden leg and then another, until I crouched again before the little door, my heart hammering against my ribs. I swallowed the saliva coating the back of my throat and lifted a hand to the tiny metal handle.

  The metal felt icy, sticky even, and I
jerked my fingers away.

  Don’t be silly. I heard my sister’s voice a second time, but it had lost its power to deflate the terror ballooning at the backs of my eyes.

  I returned to the handle, cold, and pulled. The door swung open easily, and I fell back with a thud, landing hard on my butt.

  I scrambled away, pushing my palms and heels into the polished wood floor, sure something or someone would come crawling out on hands and knees, teeth snapping at my face.

  Instead, I stared into thick darkness. A musty smell wafted out, as if it had been closed for a very long time. No yellow eyes peered from the dark. No monster bounded from the deep. The little closet sat empty, the dust on the floor undisturbed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Now

  Corrie

  I can’t remember how long it felt like Sammy and I were just pretending to be grown-ups. Playing house, mimicking our parents (his more than mine), but we were not really like those adult people. Even after the wedding and the baby and the mortgage, I still found myself elated by this enormous secret we shared: it was all just an illusion, time had stopped at twenty-one. After all, he was still Sammy. Sammy, whose gangly arms and legs were always stuffed into funky ‘70s band t-shirts and torn, faded jeans. He was cool in that way smart guys obsessed with Star Wars are cool. His always-laughing face was long and thin and made longer by his shoulder-length auburn hair that his mother called amber waves of grain. He hated and loved that.

  We rolled through life together like a single, solid wave, as steady as the tide. We were that connected. Soul mates, love of my life, the One... I got it. I understood every single cliché, every ridiculous label, every Disney-concocted fantasy of happily ever after. Not in an arrogant way, either. I didn’t stand on some pedestal of love and pity the rest of the world for their disconnected and dysfunctional relationships. I knew how lucky I was. That’s the truly awesome power of an overwhelming love - it builds this perfect bubble around you, and you sort of forget everything else.