Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel

by J. R. Erickson

  Lori's stomach grumbled. She hadn't eaten carbs in weeks and her body cried out for the food. She spooned a hefty bite into her mouth and closed her eyes, savoring. "This is so good," she whispered.

  Her mother beamed. "You always loved my cooking. Your brother, on the contrary, prefers fast food. I swear every time he visits, he's carrying a paper sack of greasy burgers and French fries."

  "He is a college student."

  "You were a college student, and you still ate dinner like a civilized human being."

  Lori nodded, though she'd rarely visited home for dinners in those years. She'd mostly stayed away, surviving on health food bars and air-puffed popcorn, refusing to live perpetually in her pudgy frame. She'd lost the weight too, but had found the only way to keep it off was to avoid her mother's house.

  "What's brought you home, honey? Just wanting a visit or issues… with Stu?"

  "What do you mean?"

  Rebecca shrugged and straightened the plastic placemats, adorned with faded daisies, on the table so they were flush with the edge. "Oh, nothing in particular. I sensed… a bit of distance between you guys at Easter."

  Lori sighed. "Stu's fine. He's the same, unchanging Stu."

  "Perhaps that's the problem."

  "How so?"

  "Well, you're turning thirty soon. That's a milestone, moving from your twenties into your thirties. Maybe Stu feels stagnant for you. He's still managing the same restaurant you guys worked at ages ago."

  "The restaurant pays good money, and he likes it," Lori argued, though in truth she'd had the same thoughts, but merely buried them.

  "Which is fine,” Rebecca insisted. “It is. But he graduated with a teaching degree and he's never taught a day in his life. You have a big professional job. You're using your degree."

  Lori snorted. "Hardly. I have a degree in humanities with a minor in mythology and folklore. I'm still an HR assistant. I haven't gotten a raise in two years. I'm not progressing either, Mom."

  "But I think you want to, honey. Maybe you want to get married and have children."

  "No, that's not what I want. Okay? I don't want to get married and I definitely don't want kids."

  "Then what do you want?"

  "To eat this soup and go take a nap. I'm exhausted."

  "Okay. Do you want me to sit with you?"

  "No, go watch your show. I'm just going to eat and go lie down."

  Rebecca patted her daughter's head and retreated to the living room. Lori felt bad for being short with her, but she didn't want to think about turning thirty or about Stu or her unfulfilling career.

  7

  Lori opened the door to her childhood room. It was a time capsule. Her mother had barely changed it since Lori had graduated from high school and moved an hour south into the dorms at Central Michigan University.

  Lori sat on the bed and surveyed the space, now a keeper of old things and extra things. Cardboard boxes spilled from the wide closet door and stood stacked in one corner of the room. A folding table sagged beneath the weight of her mother's novels, mostly Mary Higgins Clark, and her grandma Mavis’s copies of National Geographic.

  Half of the room still contained the remains of Lori's teen years. Curled posters of 90s heartthrobs hung by tacks on the wall. Freddie Prince Jr and Leonardo DiCaprio's faces had yellowed with time, forever claiming their youth in the glossy images that had once been sold at every mall in the country. Lori and Bev had bought most of the posters together.

  Lori brushed her hand over the comforter on her twin bed. It was the same comforter that had covered her daybed in Baldwin at her childhood home. Bev had liked the bedding set, navy blue and decorated in bright stars and moons. She’d told Lori she wanted to ask her parents for a similar one, but she'd never had the opportunity.

  Sitting in the little alcove that remained of the girl Lori had once been, she wondered why, in all the years she'd visited her mother and grandma, she'd never stripped off the posters, tossed out the lava lamp that still sat on the bedside table, and brought the room into the twenty-first century.

  Her brother, Henry, had updated his room. His former bedroom at their mother and grandma's house no longer contained the race-car bedding or the action figures he'd once propped proudly on his dresser. Before he’d left for college, he'd taken a load of his stuff to the thrift store and returned with a plain navy-blue bedspread. He'd hung two family pictures on the walls and left the rest of the room nearly empty.

  Lori leaned over the side of the bed and reached beneath, pulling out a plastic tote that contained most of the stuff she'd set aside when she prepared to leave for college. It contained photographs, two yearbooks, old greeting cards she couldn't part with, and a tangle of cheap jewelry that had seemed important to her as a young girl. In the bottom, she found a neon yellow poster board folded in half. She drew it out and opened it.

  At the top of one half it said, 'Bev's Dreams,' and the top of the other said 'Lori's Dreams.' They’d made vision boards before it became popular. Bev's side depicted images of athletic trophies, white-columned mansions, and handsome men.

  On Lori's side, she'd pasted exotic locations—pictures of the sugar-white beaches in Greece, the dazzling cathedrals in Europe, and, most of all, the lush Andes mountains.

  "Machu Picchu," she murmured, smiling.

  That had been the big dream, the one that appeared in multiple pictures, that she always offered when people asked, ‘If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you?’

  Her desire to visit the ancient civilization had arisen after Lori read Lost City of the Incas.

  Lori remembered sitting with Bev on her bedroom floor in Baldwin, giggling as they cut out their dreams and pasted them to the board, unaware that they would never come true.

  After sliding the poster back beneath the bed, Lori lay down and pulled the covers to her chin.

  Lori woke to the sound of crunching. She rolled over and sat up, swinging her legs over the side of her daybed, the frilly dust ruffle tickling her bare calves.

  Crunch. The sound came again, followed by a grinding and a loud, wet swallow.

  "Mom?" Lori called, unable to imagine who could be awake at such an hour and why they'd be eating. "And right outside my door," she muttered, irritated that her sleep had been disrupted. She thought she'd been dreaming, and it had been good, but there were only fragments of a feeling and no tangible details to retrace.

  She stood and made her way to her door, wondering if Henry lingered outside. Maybe he'd snuck a snack from the kitchen and sat in their bedroom hall munching away, probably making a mess on the carpet, which their mom would sigh loudly about the next day and then scrub at with a rag on her hands and knees. She wouldn't yell at Henry. She never did.

  As Lori stepped to her bedroom door, hand settling on the knob, her eyes drifted down to the sliver of light leaking beneath it. It was an odd light, reddish and misty. She didn't turn the handle, but stood and listened for the crunching sound. It had stopped, and she sensed what lay beyond the door had paused and was listening for her just as she was listening for it, and it was not Henry at all, but something much worse, something hungry.

  Though it fed and fed, it was never satisfied.

  Someone was screaming.

  It broke through the fog in Lori’s brain as light filled the room beyond her closed eyelids. Someone was shaking her, fingers digging into her biceps so hard it hurt. Her eyes flew open and she sat up fast, banging her face against her mother’s. Rebecca yelped and slid off the side of the bed. As Lori's eyes focused, she registered her mother now on the floor, eyes watering, a hand to her nose.

  "Oh, God, Mom. I'm sorry." Lori put a hand to her chin that had struck her mother in the face when she'd jerked up.

  Rebecca continued to massage her nose, climbing to her feet. "No, it's okay. I shouldn't have been right over you. You were screaming and thrashing. I was trying to wake you up."

  "I was?" Lori’s blankets and sheets lay pooled on the floor,
as if she'd kicked them off.

  Lori's eyes fluttered closed and a flash of the dream came back, something eating outside the door. She looked at her bedroom door. It hadn't been this door, but the door at her old house, her childhood house.

  "I used to worry myself sick when that happened to you." Rebecca sighed, stood and wiped a lock of sweaty hair away from Lori's forehead.

  "What do you mean? When I had nightmares?"

  "Night terrors, the doctor called them. Don't you remember? You went to see that dream doctor four or five times."

  "Dream doctor?"

  Rebecca sat back on the edge of the bed. "Dr. Childs or Chambers… no, Chadwick, Dr. Chadwick. He had an office in Traverse City, so we drove up there every couple of weeks pretty much that whole summer and into the fall."

  Lori frowned, trying to piece together a memory to go with her mother's story. Something vague drifted up—an office with white leather chairs and blue walls and, most striking of all, a gigantic window that looked out on a sparkling lake. Oddly, she couldn't remember the doctor or the conversations they'd had. "I don't remember that. When did it happen?"

  "It was the summer after… Bev. A lot was happening. Bev vanishing and then your dad and I splitting up. It was a hard time for you kids, especially for you."

  Lori leaned back on her pillows, gazing at the tiny webs of cracked plaster in the ceiling. "What did he do? The doctor?"

  "Well, he spoke with you about the episodes, but after we moved here to Grandma's house, they largely stopped and we ended treatment."

  "Did I remember what the nightmare was about?"

  Rebecca shook her head. "No, I don't believe you ever did. You didn't even remember the screaming. I'd be shaking you and yelling in your ear and it would take a long time to wake you up. It was very scary."

  "And I did it again just now."

  "Something like it, yes."

  8

  The following day, Lori tried to work up the courage to call Ben Shaw.

  Lori stared at his number on her cell phone, but didn't hit send. What was she going to say? How did you approach someone about a disappearance that had happened decades before? She considered how she'd want to be approached, but the only word that popped in her head was ‘politely.’

  "Sounds like something Grandma Mavis would say," she murmured, hitting the green button to make the call.

  It rang twice and then a man answered. "This is Ben," he said, sounding distracted.

  Lori could hear voices and other sounds in the background. "Hi, Ben. My name's Lori."

  "Are you the one interested in the bike?" he asked.

  "Yes, the bike," she lied, suddenly feeling it would be easier to bring up the missing girls in person rather than on the phone.

  "Okay, well, it's still available, but I've had a few calls on it. You can check it out this afternoon. I'll be home between three and five."

  "Okay, sure. That's great. Where is that exactly?" She silently prayed he didn't rattle off an address in another state or somewhere hours away.

  "732 Clairmont Drive."

  "Great, ummm... and what city?"

  He paused as if it were a stupid question, and maybe it was. "Clare. Like it said in the ad."

  "That's where my mom lives," Lori blurted. “I’m there now.”

  "Great."

  "Okay. I'll see you around three.”

  "That works, and do you have a bike rack or a truck? The last person who came to buy a bike didn't have any way to get it home."

  Lori thought of her Prius, which definitely did not contain a bike rack. "Yep, I do."

  "Good."

  He hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

  That afternoon, Lori guided her car onto Clairmont Drive, a nice subdivision with large tree-filled lots.

  She parked in front of 732 Clairmont. It was a two-story colonial with a screened-in side porch and a two-car garage. The garage door stood only halfway open. A green road bike sat in the driveway. As Lori climbed from her car, a man ducked under the garage door and walked to the bike, disengaged the kickstand and rolled the bike down the driveway towards her.

  His eyes narrowed on her Prius, and Lori felt color climb into her neck.

  He was handsome, with penetrating gray eyes and unkempt sandy hair. He wore faded jeans and a plain gray t-shirt.

  "Hi, are you Ben?" she asked the man.

  "Yep. And this is the Schwinn. It has new tires and tubes, new cables. I greased it and I've tested it out myself. It's a good bike."

  "Is that what you do for a living? Work on bikes?" Lori asked.

  "I'm a nurse," he told her.

  "Really? That's cool."

  He smiled. "I don't know about cool, but it's becoming more commonplace, which is nice."

  "What do you mean?"

  He shrugged. "That old B.S. that 'men can't be nurses.' That was still pretty rampant when I first started school and I'm grateful it's faded. Let's just say that."

  "It seems like a hard job." Lori fidgeted, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jeans and half-considering commenting on the weather.

  "Some days, but it's a rewarding job. I've never regretted it. Anyway, this bike is great for beginners. Not to say you're a beginner, but—"

  "Well, umm… I'm not actually here about the bike."

  Ben glanced at her car a second time, irritation flickering across his expression. He straightened up. "Okay. Then why are you here?"

  "I wondered if you'd be up for talking to me about Summer Newton."

  His eyes flashed, and his jaw went tight. He shook his head. "No. I'm not open to talking about that." He turned and started away.

  "Wait. Why not? I—" Lori put up her hands, though his back was now to her.

  "Listen." He spun around, glaring at her. "I told the police everything that I know twenty years ago. I had nothing to do with Summer's disappearance. My sister had nothing to do with her disappearance. Please, I'm just trying to live my life." He turned and started away.

  "I'm not a reporter or anything. It happened to me too. My friend vanished in the woods."

  He'd made it halfway up the driveway, but his feet slowed. His back rose and fell as if he were breathing rapidly. After a moment, he returned to where she stood.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "My name's Lori Hicks. On June tenth, 1998, I went for a walk in the woods with my best friend, Beverly Silva. We lived in Baldwin then. She climbed up a tree and just… vanished. I never saw her come down, and we searched the woods, us and police and volunteers, for weeks. We never found her."

  Ben ran a hand through his hair and then left his hand there, massaging the back of his head as if a sudden headache had struck him. "Okay, what then? What does that have to do with Summer?"

  "Well, I heard about Summer at a bonfire a couple of nights ago. This guy Kurt told the story. Kurt Hatchell. His brother was friends with you."

  Ben rolled his eyes. "Pissant Kurt. Nosy little bugger."

  "When I heard the story, I thought he made it up. Like this group of people had conspired to use my story… but then I confronted him. He’d never heard of Bev, but he said this thing with Summer really happened."

  "It did."

  "It happened to Bev too, and here's what's weird. She had this necklace on, a bola, a little bell.”

  He frowned.

  "Like Summer's bracelet," Lori added.

  "I see the connection you're trying to make, but—"

  "I heard her bell that night and something else too, this far-off screech in the woods, this inhuman sound. People heard the bell later too, people searching the woods, but we never found her and afterwards… people said I did it. Kids at school said I was jealous of her and killed her and buried her out there."

  "Assholes," Ben muttered.

  "They did it to you too, right? They blamed you and your sister?"

  He nodded. "That's what people do in small towns."

  "Bev went missing in the Manistee Nationa
l Forest just like Summer."

  "The Manistee National Forest is over five hundred thousand acres. I'm sure a lot of people have gone missing there."

  "But under such similar circumstances? Both teenage girls, both wearing a bell-type thing?"

  "I'm not sure what you want me to say here. What if they are connected? So what?"

  "You don't care?" Lori swallowed the sticky ball rising into her throat, feeling the needling sensation of tears behind her eyes.

  He sighed, exasperated. "Believe me, I spent most of my life caring too much, hunting for the truth. Eventually I had to accept that I'd probably never know."

  "But two girls missing is more information."

  "Then go to the police."

  Lori pulled her hands from her pockets and tugged at her t-shirt, feeling desperation sneaking in. "I thought… maybe we could compare notes. Maybe—"

  "No." He waved a dismissive hand. "I'm not interested." He grabbed the handlebars of the bike and turned, pedaling it back toward the garage.

  "What if they're connected?" she called out. "What if that one piece of information leads us to who took them?”

  Lori watched him for another moment and then walked back to her car.

  She slid behind the wheel, angry and hurt and mildly chastised. She had been foolish to show up at his house. There were probably hundreds of girls who went missing in Michigan every year. The tiny balloon of hope she'd felt as she drove to his house deflated inside her as she started the engine and pulled away.

  Ben waited until the woman left. He stripped off his jeans and t-shirt and pulled on his padded cycling shorts and jersey. He strapped his bike helmet beneath his chin and wheeled his road bike from the garage, climbed on and clipped his feet into the pedals.

  For three hours, Ben rode, pumping his legs furiously. The road was one place he could silence his mind and he worked hard to do it now, refusing to think of the woman’s pleading eyes as she stood in his driveway.