Dark Omen: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Sorry for that look. I reserve it for Linda.” She spoke Linda’s name as if she were describing slimy Brussel sprouts.

  “I met Linda,” Bette admitted. “I’m guessing she’s earned a few dirty looks.”

  “And a swift kick in the pants; though being a lady, I don’t permit myself.” Eliza smirked. “Roger across the hall more than makes up for my passivity. He throws his food tray at her at least once a week.”

  Bette laughed and glanced down the hall, where she saw Linda looking towards them suspiciously.

  Eliza leaned out, grimaced and tucked her head back in.

  “You better come in, dear. If we loiter, she might give us a ticket.”

  Bette followed the woman into the little room.

  A twin bed stood against a wall, covered in a blanket flecked with blue and yellow flowers. In one corner stood a kitchenette with a mini fridge and sink. A dish-drying rack occupied the tiny counter beside it.

  The space was cozy, small for a woman of Eliza’s stature. By the window, two wicker chairs sat with a table between them.

  Eliza moved easily. It took her only three strides to cross the room and settle into a chair. She gestured to the one opposite her.

  “I admit that my mind’s not what it once was, but for the life of me, I cannot place you, dear. Have we met?”

  Bette shook her head. “This might sound strange, but I’m a friend of Weston Meeks.”

  Eliza continued to smile at her, puzzled, and then awareness crossed her features.

  “Oh yes, yes. The young man who called about the asylum and the Claude family in particular. Well, that’s a long story, and I’d offer you a cup of tea, but we’re not permitted hot plates. Nor tea kettles. I wonder if Linda fears one of the guests might club her over the head with it. Guests,” she repeated with a snort.

  Bette took the other chair. “Why do you live here, Eliza? You look healthy. I mean—”

  “Not like an invalid?” Eliza asked, eyes twinkling. “I’m not dead, not in the slightest. But I choose to live here, believe it or not. I’ve been having seizures since an accident at my former workplace, the Northern Michigan Asylum. That happened in the seventies, a long time ago now, two decades.”

  She shook her head as if disbelieving the passage of time.

  “You worked at an asylum?” Bette asked.

  “Yes. I was a nurse at the Northern Michigan Asylum for nearly forty years. I went through their nursing school and everything. Such a beautiful place. Have you ever been?”

  “No,” Bette admitted. “I’ve seen photographs. It seemed a bit ominous, honestly.”

  Eliza nodded.

  “Oh, yes, it is that. And it’s not all in your head either.” Eliza winked at her.

  “Can you tell me about the Claudes? Did they live at the asylum?

  Bette remembered Lisa’s claim that Greta Claude had grown up on the grounds of an insane asylum.

  Eliza lifted a hand to the back of her head, wincing as if something pained her.

  “I’m sorry, are you okay, Mrs. Sanders?”

  For a moment, the woman didn’t respond. Her eyes had shifted down, and she continued cradling the back of her head with one hand. When she looked back at Bette, an uneasiness had settled over her features.

  “I haven’t spoken about Joseph Claude in… more than a decade at least.”

  “But you knew him?”

  Elia nodded. “Oh yes, everyone at the asylum knew him. He was the caretaker. The man we called if the toilet chains broke or a window had frozen shut. That was in the earlier years. Joseph suffered a mental breakdown at the beginning of the seventies. He was admitted to the asylum as a patient. He’d begun to hallucinate. Eventually, one of the doctors diagnosed him as a schizophrenic, but I never believed it.”

  “Why not?”

  The woman folded her hands on the table and looked out at the glossy grass.

  “I worked with a lot of schizophrenic patients. Joseph bore little resemblance to them. The only characteristic he shared with those suffering from schizophrenia was visions, but he didn’t see all types of things. Not at all. He saw only one thing, one man in particular.”

  “A man?” Bette asked.

  “The man in the blue tuxedo?”

  Bette frowned.

  “He saw the man everywhere,” Eliza continued. “He couldn’t use the bathroom without running out, screaming in terror. The man in the blue tuxedo was following him, stalking him, haunting him. He ranted and raved. He had to be kept in a private room and spent most of his final years in solitude because he agitated the other patients. He was also a risk to himself and others. More than once, he attacked other patients claiming they were the man in the blue tuxedo.”

  Eliza put a hand to her head a second time.

  “Joseph Claude is the reason I have seizures. One night, when I was administering his meds before bed, he grabbed hold of my shoulders and started to bash the back of my head into the wall. I have only a vague memory of it. I lost consciousness. I was lucky to have survived.”

  Bette shivered. “That’s terrifying. I’m so sorry, Eliza.”

  Eliza put on a brave smile that revealed all the lines around her mouth and eyes.

  “Water under the bridge, as they say,” she said dismissively.

  “Did Joseph Claude have a daughter?” Bette asked.

  Eliza nodded, rubbing the nearly translucent skin on her knuckles.

  “Arthritis,” she said. “Odd, I’ve noticed it flares up when I talk about the asylum. Isn’t that funny?” She shook her head. “Joseph Claude had two daughters. Twins, Greta and Maribelle.”

  “Twins?” Bette asked, surprised. She hadn’t heard anything about a sister.

  “Maribelle died when she was eight years old,” Eliza explained.

  51

  Then

  Crystal lay in the fetal position on the mattress, legs curled close to her body as if she might somehow protect her unborn child from external dangers. But of course it wasn’t the external danger that would ultimately destroy her. Crystal’s own body would do that when malnourishment kicked in. When her organism realized there was not enough food and water to sustain both beings.

  A baby cannot survive without the mother — period — so the baby would be the first to die. Life would cease, and she’d return to that place beyond the stars, that unfathomable realm Crystal sometimes dreamed of, where her mother floated in a gossamer web of light.

  She laid her hand on the old, soft and gray wood floor, pressing the nail of her index finger down and embedding her number in the wood. She did it again and again, row after row of six, two, five, one, nine, nine, one. Six, two, five, one, nine, nine, one.

  The number’s meaning had become known to her that morning as she woke feverish, the sounds of child laughter echoing through the old house. June the twenty-fifth, nineteen-ninety-one. It was a date. The day of her death.

  How had she never recognized it?

  Or, perhaps she’d known all along and closed her heart to the truth. She’d always known death would come early, but had she realized she held the exact date in her head?

  How many days had she been in captivity? Ten, eleven?

  As she pushed the grooves into the wood, leaving her mark on the space so filled with horror for the woman who now held her captive, Crystal felt little anger. Most of her pain stemmed from grief. Grief that her unborn child would never take their first shaky breath in a strange, and sometimes unbearable, world. Grief for Bette who would devote the rest of her days to searching for her sister. Grief for her father who would probably slip into his academia and perhaps never re-emerge, as a way to cope with his pain. And grief last of all for Weston, for the love that might have been.

  Crystal also felt sorrow for the woman who would take her life. The woman shaped and molded by dark beliefs and even darker deeds.

  * * *

  Crystal woke weak and thirsty.

  Greta stood in the doorway watching her. She
said nothing, simply studied her, and the expression in her eyes chilled Crystal.

  Greta had come to a conclusion of some sort, and Crystal knew what it was.

  “I’m going to die today. Today is June twenty-fifth, isn’t it?” Crystal asked.

  Greta remained silent. Her eyes drifted from Crystal’s face to her raw fingertips and then to the tiny grooves marring the walls and floor. Crystal had carved the date over and over. In the previous days, it had become a mantra, a focus to keep from ruminating on the thought of her baby dying inside her.

  She tried not to imagine Bette, her father and, of course, Wes. It was impossible. They filled every space between the numbers, every breath, every moment of pause.

  The pot in the corner had begun to stink, and flies buzzed above it and landed on the porcelain rim.

  At first it had made her gag, the early pregnancy turning her susceptible to waves of nausea at even moderate smells. Bad smells left her stomach churning, her guts clenching as they tried to release their contents, but she hadn’t eaten in days. The only thing she’d managed to spit up was a stream of yellow, bitter-smelling bile. It was in a puddle next to her bed, as she’d grown too exhausted to even creep into the opposite corner to throw up.

  “How quickly we become animals,” Greta said, eyes traveling the length of Crystal’s body. “What we truly are. Do you think he would love you if he saw you like this? If he saw the truth of you? What you are beneath the glossy red hair and the pretty clothes? When your sparkling personality has been replaced by fear and hunger and desperation?”

  Crystal didn’t respond. She let her eyes drift closed.

  Had she intended to fight? To try and overpower Greta and ensure the survival of her child?

  She smiled, her lips cracking. It seemed absurd now. The most ridiculous idea she’d ever had — the belief that she could fight this woman off, this woman who’d been murdering people for years and getting away with it.

  “Water,” Crystal begged, not bothering to open her eyes because she couldn’t.

  The sand man must have come, her mother used to tell her and Bette on especially sleepy mornings.

  “Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream,” Crystal murmured.

  Greta leaned down and set something on the floor.

  Slowly, Crystal opened her eyes and turned to stare at the glass of water. Her stomach cramped at the sight of it.

  She clenched her eyes shut and pulled her legs in.

  “Dehydration is an ugly death,” Greta taunted. “Your eyes are yellow. People beg to die when their body dehydrates.”

  Greta lifted her foot, clad in a black flat. She pushed her toe against the side of the glass.

  “No,” Crystal croaked, watching the water, forcing herself to roll sideways.

  Greta pushed the glass of water over as Crystal flopped from the bed onto the floor. She crawled toward the wetness already disappearing into the floorboards.

  As she lowered her face to press her tongue to the wood, she smelled the liquid and recoiled. It wasn’t water at all, but bleach.

  She lifted her eyes, an effort that made her head swim and ache.

  Greta stepped backwards into the hall, slamming the door behind her.

  Crystal listened as the lock slid into place.

  52

  Now

  “She died when she was eight?” Bette asked. “That’s heartbreaking.”

  Eliza nodded.

  “Indeed, it was. Maribelle was a beautiful little girl. Just full of light. Sometimes I thought she’d been born into the wrong family.”

  Bette studied the old woman. “Why?”

  “The Claudes were… I don’t know how to describe them. Hard, maybe. People of the land. Not the salt of the earth, mind you, just hard like the land itself. The kind of people who till fields for two hundred years. Not only do their faces get ruddy and weathered, but their hearts do as well.

  “Joseph Claude had a sharp tongue and a stern hand. His wife died shortly after the girls were born. She had been a quiet, stiff woman, and she died a quiet death. I never saw Joseph hug Greta or Maribelle, but still Maribelle sang and danced and laughed. She was precocious. Claude put her in the children’s ward when she eight. He claimed she was exhibiting mental problems. Some of us nurses tried to shield her, but…” Eliza shook her head and her eyes filled with sadness.

  “What happened to her?” Bette asked.

  “It’s a mystery. A mystery that was never investigated, of course. The asylum called it a terrible accident. They found Maribelle’s body in the steam tunnels. They said she’d been trying to escape and must have fallen and broken her neck.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “Her body told another story.” Eliza closed her eyes, her features pinched as if it hurt to remember. “Bruises and broken fingernails. She looked like she’d fought for her life. There were rumors a patient had murdered her. A few of us nurses went to the sheriff in town. He listened to our story, but Joseph Claude went in two days later. No autopsy, he said. No investigation. His daughter had gone insane, and he wouldn’t have the police making a spectacle of her death.”

  “And the sheriff listened to him?” Bette asked.

  “Two of the sheriff’s sons worked at the hospital. The town relied on the asylum. It wasn’t just Claude who told the police to back down. There were doctors involved too. A few months later, the police office announced it had received a large anonymous donation.”

  “And you think someone in the asylum did that?”

  Bette thought of the wealthy and mysterious people who’d whisked Greta Claude away from Marquette.

  Eliza nodded. “Yes, I do. I could never prove it, and two nurses were fired after they continued pushing the asylum to investigate. Years later Joseph Claude came into the asylum as a patient. A little over a year after that I was injured and had to leave my position. I received a settlement which allowed me to live comfortably, and I still had Jim. That was my husband. He passed three years ago. By the time I left the Northern Michigan Asylum, I knew better than to speak of Maribelle Claude.”

  Bette crossed her legs and leaned forward. “I’m trying to understand why the doctors at the asylum would have protected a caretaker. And who could have donated the money? Was Joseph Claude wealthy?”

  “I wish I had answers for you, but I was only a nurse,” Eliza admitted. “I will say this, the relationship between Joseph Claude and the doctors was an unusual one. He wasn’t kind to them. He didn’t tiptoe around them like the other asylum staff.

  “You have this idea that the caretaker would sort of prostrate himself to the doctors, but in a way, it sometimes felt like Claude called the shots. Never obviously. So many of the goings on happened in secret. I learned of them in whispered conversations with other nurses and orderlies. When Claude was admitted, more than a few doctors seemed downright afraid of him. As far as I know, he didn’t have any money, but many of the doctors were very wealthy. I suspect the donation came from them.”

  Bette frowned. “Would that generosity have extended to Greta Claude?”

  “Perhaps,” Eliza said.

  “What was Greta Claude like?” Bette wondered.

  Eliza leaned forward and plucked a stuffed Scottish terrier toy from a shelf near her window.

  “Jim and I always had Scotties,” she said, smiling and petting the plastic nose on the stuffed animal. “No pets allowed in here, but my son gave me this to keep me company.” She snuggled the dog into her lap. “Greta Claude was very quiet, watchful. She spied on the staff at the hospital. She hid in the trees and the woods. Most of us believed she reported everything she saw to her father. Greta and Maribelle were like night and day. When Maribelle smiled, Greta frowned.

  “After Maribelle’s death, I tried to engage Greta a few times. I was worried about her. Not only had her sister died, but her twin. The girls were homeschooled. They didn’t have friends outside of the asylum. Maribelle played with some of the kids from the childr
en’s ward, but Greta never did. After Maribelle died, Greta became even more withdrawn. We rarely saw her. A few patients claimed to see her through the windows at night. As if she were wandering the grounds after dark, but I never saw her myself.”

  “And what happened to her after they admitted her father?” Bette asked.

  “I heard she went to live with family in the Upper Peninsula. The girl’s mother had family up there.”

  “Did a new caretaker start at the asylum?”

  “Oh no,” Eliza shook her head. “I mean, not in the same way. They boarded up Joseph Claude’s house. The hospital hired local men to do the handy work, but no one moved into the caretaker’s property.”

  “Why is that?”

  Eliza shrugged. “The world of medicine was changing. By the late seventies, institutions all over the country were closing down. Some of our own doctors left to pursue practices that focused on medication for mental illness. And truth be told, half the patients didn’t suffer any illness at all. I mean, in the early days, women were institutionalized for post-partum depression. Men were institutionalized for homosexuality. The evolution of our minds is a big part of what led to the collapse of those asylums. We realized we weren’t treating illnesses at all.”

  “Greta ended up leaving the Upper Peninsula after someone with money came to get her,” Bette explained. “Do you have any idea who that might have been?”

  Eliza looked mystified. “If I had to guess, I would point towards the doctors at the Northern Michigan Asylum.”

  * * *

  Bette stopped near a flower bed outside Sunny Angels. A paper cup of coffee had been thrown toward the trash can, but missed and now hung from a bush of heavy pink roses.

  Bette pulled the cup loose and walked it to the trash.

  Higher Grounds, the label read, reminding Bette of the coffee shop Crystal worked at, Sacred Grounds.

  Bette paused and stared at the cup. Some memory seemed to be forcing its way up from the depths of her mind.