The old woman shuffled along dark wood floors into a vast sitting room with furniture jumbled on threadbare rugs.
“Sit down,” the woman insisted, motioning toward a stiff black chair with cracks in its leather cushion.
She sat opposite me, and I noticed her eyes had an opaque sheen. I wondered if she was blind. Though she stared at me for a long time, as if she saw me clearly.
“Tell me what you want,” the woman said, her cheeks sunken so that the bones of her face cast huge shadows in the dim light.
“I want my husband back,” I whispered.
“Do you?” the woman asked, her wrinkled hands hovering in the air as if she were reaching out, asking the question not of me, but the empty space between us.
She reached down. Her gnarled hands clutched a cup of bitter-smelling tea with surprising steadiness. She held me in the most intense steely gaze and I wanted to break the stare, but feared she would consider me weak and choose not to help me. “Because when you open that door, you don’t get to choose what comes through,” the old woman hissed.
“I’ll do whatever it takes. I need guidance, that’s all, a place to start.”
I set the envelope of cash on the table between us. Her thin, chapped lips curved at the corners. I felt sure she knew I’d placed five hundred dollars in the envelope with no need to count it.
She stood and shuffled out of the room, and returned with a tattered, stained book as large as the old dictionaries at the public library. I was amazed that she was able to carry it. She set it on the table with a thud and nimbly flipped it open to the exact page she wanted. She pulled out a notebook of yellowing paper and scratched words on the page in tiny cursive handwriting.
As she wrote, I stayed perfectly still. I feared at any moment she would realize what a terrible mistake she was making.
Somewhere in the ancient, heavy house, a clock chimed. It reverberated along the walls and floorboards, and it reminded me of the tolling bells of an old church from my childhood. A church that always smelled of dust and the talcum powder of old skin. The church my mother insisted we attend every Sunday, when I was eight years old, during one of her rare periods of sobriety. She’d had a nightmare about the devil and suddenly believed in an angry God who punished those who did not worship.
I shivered and counted ten chimes.
Night had fallen, and I was not sure when, because I swore I’d been in the old woman’s house for only a few minutes. But when I returned my gaze to the yellowing paper, her hand no longer moved across the page. Her chair sat empty. She had folded the paper in half and left it behind. The smoldering candles on the fireplace mantel had burned down and sat gooey in their waxy red bases.
I shook my head and looked around, expecting to see her, but only emptiness greeted me. I stood, and my back and legs ached as though had I been in the chair for a long time.
When I opened the front door, a violent wind pulled the door from my hand. The wind caught the folded paper and sent it, in a whoosh, back into the house. I fought the door closed and returned to the shadowy hallway. I got on my hands and knees and looked beneath a heavy buffet. Dirt and balls of cat hair greeted me, but no slip of paper.
A loud bang sent me reeling back into the room, and I whipped around. It was only the front door, slamming in the wind, but a chill streaked down my spine.
Only desperation to have that piece of paper kept me in the old woman’s house. I returned to the floor and slid my hand under an ancient-looking sofa, and then continued to a cabinet filled with moth-eaten books and half-melted candles. I eyed a few of the titles, dealing with the esoteric, and noticed the spine of a withered red book.
“Calling Back the Dead,” the title promised, and I eased open the cabinet door that groaned in protest but gave way beneath my insistent fingers. I pulled the book from several others and blew a layer of dust off the surface. The cover held the image of a shadowy figure with its mouth stretched wide, and as I looked into the gaping mouth, a thousand other dimensions seemed to pour forth.
In an instant, I saw the beginning of all life in an explosion of light, and then the desperate crawling from the primordial muck to become dwellers of the land. I saw men, skin and bones, and women with flesh sagging, tearing at each other with sharp, taloned fingers. I gazed at radiant beings of light fleeing from the dense, darkened earth. The cold wind of their absence numbed me, and maybe I cried out, but could not say because already the image of a mother nursing a dead child had overtaken my sight. And then she too vanished, replaced by a field, the soil freshly tilled, heaped with rotting bodies. The bodies writhed and climbed up out of their shallow graves to trek across the field toward me.
The old woman snatched the book from my hand, and with unnatural speed returned it to the cabinet and locked the glass door. Her eyes gleamed, and I recognized both anger and glee there, as if she wanted me to find that book, but also felt protective of its secrets. She thrust the paper I had been searching for into my hand and shoved me out the door.
I stood on her porch, and a gust of wind brought me back to reality or sanity or somewhere between. My knees wobbled, and I imagined sinking down and sitting on the porch, wrapping my arms tight around my legs, and willing away the horrors that had just beseeched me.
I needed to get away from her house. It rose behind me like one of the undead things crawling from the earth. I stumbled and nearly fell getting to my car, but once inside I could breathe again.
I tucked the paper in my purse. As I pulled from her driveway, I glanced in the rear-view mirror and slammed the brakes.
Sammy stood behind me. He reached toward the car, and in the taillights his eyes were two red orbs. I gasped and clutched the handle, cursing my locked car door. I hit the unlock button, thrust the door open, and stumbled into the night.
The empty driveway yawned before me. Dried leaves swirled in the crackling air.
“He’s dead,” I whispered, a reminder that never quite took hold. “Sammy is dead.”
CHAPTER 35
Now
Sarah
Sarah watched the man’s face twitch when Will held open his palm and revealed the key resting in its center.
The man reached out, but Will jerked his hand back.
“I’ll hang onto it,” Will said.
The man smirked but said nothing, and a sense of unease fell over Sarah.
Dr. K insisted they return to the forest at night, lest the curious eyes of the construction crew at Building Fifty spot them. Sarah stuffed her hands into the pockets of her brown suede jacket, pressing her chin to her chest to protect her neck against the icy wind that slithered cold beneath her collar.
As they walked through the asylum forest, the old doctor grew livelier, his pace quickening.
As they neared the hill, a three-quarters moon lighting their way, Sarah heard a voice.
“Wait,” she demanded.
Dr. K and Will stopped, turning to face her.
“Did you guys hear that?”
Will looked around uncertainly, but the doctor’s thin mouth turned up in a malicious smile.
“You’ll hear many things in these woods at night. Best not to linger.”
He turned back to the trail and hurried along.
“Please…” the voice came again, a whisper so much like the wind she couldn’t separate the two. This time Will cocked his head, glancing back at her with an uneasy look in his eyes.
They walked down the small hill into the hollow of trees.
“The key, please,” the man told Will, his eyes almost feverish with desire.
Will handed him the key.
Sarah and Will had searched the space for hours, coming up empty, but the doctor strode purposefully to a wall of brush, stuck his hand inside and pushed open a door.
“How?” Will asked, shaking his head. He reached his hands into the brush around the opening, patting and searching.
Sarah stared at the bushes for a long moment, committing the tangle of
vines to memory, noting the angle of a young maple tree. She bent down and raked her hands through the dirt, marking the entrance to the door.
CORRIE
* * *
“ARE ANY OF THE BIRDS SICK?” I asked, gazing into the glass cage where parakeets hopped from little wooden branches. They cheeped and chittered.
“I’m sorry?” the young man asked who’d walked over to help me.
“I’d like to adopt one nobody else would want. If there’s a sick or injured bird…” I trailed off.
He scratched the blond stubble on his chin and shook his head.
“We don’t sell ‘em if they’re sick.”
I swallowed thickly and pointed. “I’ll take that one.”
“The blue with the black spots by his nose?”
I nodded and turned away.
“Do you need a cage? Food? I can get him ready while you pick out your other-”
“No,” I interrupted him. “I have those things at home.”
I drove to Kerry Manor, listening to the bird. He chirped for the first few minutes, and then the sounds grew quieter with long stretches of silence between. I wondered if he sensed what lay ahead.
Sarah
* * *
THE ENCHIRIDION LAY heavy and neglected on a wooden pew in a dark corner of the cold chamber.
As Will crept toward the book, his eyes wide, Sarah blinked around the room, using her torch to illuminate the wooden benches, the stone floor, and rows of carefully laid bricks curving to the ceiling.
A moist, rank smell hovered in the chamber.
The old doctor walked to a bed suspended on a platform. He placed his hands on the grimy yellow sheet and closed his eyes.
Sarah preferred not to imagine the memories he savored.
“Let’s get out of here,” Will said, taking up the heavy book and holding it against his chest.
“Not just yet,” the doctor said, and his eyes looked darker, without color, as he pulled a small pistol from beneath his layers of coats.
“No way, man. Is this a joke?” Will asked, taking a step back.
“The chamber is a special place,” the doctor told them, tilting his face up as if relishing the odor of something ancient and decayed the space emanated. “It gives, and it takes. The power of this place,” again he fingered the filthy hospital bed, “brought the key to me. Now payment is due.”
CORRIE
* * *
I CARRIED the box containing the bird and set it on the kitchen counter. After grabbing the other items on the old woman’s list from my car, I pulled a cast-iron pot from a cupboard and set it near the butcher block. Carefully cutting open their pouches, I dumped dried yew, thyme, and yarrow in the pot. The house creaked and groaned, growing louder as I worked. The bird cheeped, the wind whipped against the windows.
Near the lake, I scraped bark from the oak tree with a hammer’s claw. I filled a plastic bag with dirt and grass from the space where Sammy’s body had lain.
I added those to the pot. Next came bits of his hair from a brush, the bristles from his toothbrush, and a letter he’d written me. I grimaced and drew in a hard breath as I dropped the sheet of paper with his words, his writing, into the pot.
When I took out the bird, he squeaked and hopped away. I did not want to look at his tiny black eyes as I lay him on the block and lifted the knife.
Sarah
* * *
“US?” Sarah asked. She glanced at Will, whose knuckles had gone white as he clutched the book. He wasn’t looking at Dr. K. but studying the room, as if planning his attack.
“That book doesn’t leave here, and neither do you,” the doctor whispered.
“Why?” Sarah asked, knowing their only hope was time and mentally chastising herself for her stupidity. Who followed a deranged man into a hidden forest chamber without a weapon?
“I, better than anyone, know the score of this place. Do you think it gives freely? Don’t you hear their cries?” He cocked his head, and a little smile played on his lips.
“You are completely insane,” Sarah muttered.
Will had begun to edge toward the only other torch in the room that was lit when they first entered.
“I’m not a vagrant. I’m a scholar, a doctor. I’ve waited twenty years to come back to this place. The source of my awakening, of a power that is indescribable.”
His voice had shifted. The rambling of the homeless man had given way to someone much cleverer and more controlled.
“This is an act?” she gestured at his clothes. “You’re not really homeless?”
The man’s eyes glittered, and Sarah suspected that no, he was not homeless.
“I have many friends in low places. Unlike my colleagues, I learned years ago your greatest assets are the people beneath you, the people who can slither and slip into the dark places where secrets live.”
“Why did you need us? If you wanted the key, you could have gotten it yourself.”
The doctor laughed and put his finger on his chin, as if watching them squirm delighted him.
“Time is irrelevant, but magic, synchronicity, that is where the power flows. I have known for years the key would come to me. I had to be patient and allow the forces that work tirelessly from the shadows to bring the moment into being, the perfect placement of myself, you, and this key. The chamber had chosen its sacrifice. I am merely a messenger.”
“But you orchestrated the whole thing. No supreme power brought us here. You told us where to get the key, you brought us here,” Sarah insisted.
The man’s eyes flickered, but his smile did not shift.
“Every outcome has a series of players, of action and consequence. Consider this gun. When I cocked it, I prepared the gun for firing. When I pull the trigger, a tiny pin will hit the bullet encased in its primer shell. An explosion will occur and the bullet will find its target. If a single component was absent, the firing pin for instance, the outcome shifts. Death occurs when every piece plays its part. The moment Maurice contacted me, I knew the chamber had created the way. And now here we are, fates colliding. For me it is the beginning of the next journey, and for both of you, it is the end. Don’t you see? A thousand choices had to occur to bring us to this instant. And here we are.”
Sarah’s mind reeled. If this man murdered them, they’d never be discovered.
CORRIE
* * *
I DROVE to the graveyard in a state of numbness. Periodically, the chirp of the bird seemed to fill my car, but then I remembered what was left of the bird lay in the pot, and it most definitely was not singing.
At the cemetery, I heaved the pot from the back seat, ignoring the dark mixture that lay within it. I dug my hands into the dirt on Sammy’s grave and poured the mixture into the tilled soil. I spoke the words from the sheet, ancient-sounding foreign words I could not pronounce. As I stroked and kneaded the muddy mixture, I shut down my mind. Sense wanted to steal me from this place, demand I return home, hide the evidence and never think of it again.
I read the old woman’s directions.
“The essence must ripen for thirteen hours. Do not retrieve it a second before.”
Sarah
* * *
WILL STEPPED CLOSER to the torch.
The doctor frowned and pointed the gun at him.
“You can only shoot one of us,” Will told him, the fire reflected in his green eyes. “I think this book will burn in seconds. By the time you pull the trigger, if you drop me with one bullet, a lifetime of research will be half-burned. Then you’ll have a choice - to fight Sarah, who’ll surely be attacking you to get the gun, or put out the book and salvage a few pages.”
Will pushed the Enchiridion closer, and the fire reached toward the yellowed pages.
“Stop,” the doctor barked. He shifted the gun toward Sarah, as if he’d decided shooting her would somehow serve him better.
“The outcome will be the same,” Will told him, staring hard into his eyes. “You’re outnumbered, ma
n. Even with the gun, you’re losing something here tonight.”
And it was clear he would lose the Enchiridion, perhaps the item he wanted most of all. But Sarah sensed the doctor had gone too far. His intention to kill them both outweighed any ability to rationalize the moment. Will also seemed to recognize the direness of their situation.
Will threw the book as hard as he could at the doctor, and then lunged toward him.
The doctor fired, and Sarah felt a sting as the bullet whizzed by her shoulder.
The man jerked the gun toward Will, but Will was upon him. He shoved the doctor to the ground and slammed him into the stone floor. The doctor butted his head hard, connecting with Will’s jaw. Will grunted but didn’t release the man’s arm. Sarah grabbed the gun and wrenched it away. The man grabbed Will around the throat, and Sarah cocked the gun.
“Let him go, now.”
But the doctor gritted his teeth, stared hard into Will’s eyes, and tightened his grip.
Will opened and closed his mouth, holding onto the doctor’s wrists and trying to pry the man’s hands away.
“Shoot him,” Will croaked.
But she couldn’t. She turned the gun in her hand and cracked the man on the top of his skull. The impact shook her arms, but he continued to squeeze, and then his grip loosened and went slack. His eyes remained open, but shuttered and closed before opening again and blinking into the room.
Will rolled off him, snatched the book up with one hand, massaging his throat with the other.
“Come on,” Sarah said, grabbing Will’s hand and dragging him to his feet.
“Wait.” He dropped next to the man and scrambled to the dirty little fanny pack at the man’s waist. He rifled through and grabbed the long, dark key. They stood and fled back down the dark tunnel and into the night.
CHAPTER 36
Now
Calling Back the Dead: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 20
