Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel

by J. R. Erickson

  “Dreams are a bridge of sorts from the unconscious, a way for that material to be translated and sent to the conscious so that we might integrate it into our lives and deal with our traumas, fears, et cetera. In the arena of dreams, we can have a lived experience of a trauma and we can overcome it. We can transmute it from something horrific into something benign."

  "So nightmares are a way to heal from bad things that have happened to us?” Lori asked.

  "In a person who has learned to work with their dreams, yes, they can be that. In a person who is merely dreaming and having nightmares with little thought to their meaning, no. Dreams and nightmares can actually be further traumatizing. If we are abused by a parent and that parent appears each night in our dream and we continue to be the victim and to be abused, the psyche is not distinguishing that experience from the actual abuse. Further trauma ensues. But if we look at the dream from Jung's perspective and see the recurring nightmare as our unconscious saying 'hello, excuse me, this needs to be healed, this needs to be dealt with,' and we then go to that dream and begin working with it for a different outcome, then we can heal the trauma that the dream is attempting to make us aware of."

  "How though? I don't have control over what happens in my dreams."

  "Well, there's deep work that goes into such things. Lucid dreaming is one way, but many people never master the skill. What we can master is dreaming while awake, going back through the dream in deeper and deeper detail and in our imagination choosing a new outcome again and again. In the case of the abusive parent, we might see that parent stop the hitting and instead hug their child and apologize for how they've wronged them."

  "Why not show the child picking up a bat and beating the parent back?"

  "It's interesting how many people leap to that conclusion. To me, that is evidence of decay inherent in our society. Trauma is occurring on both sides of the fist. Both the abuser and the abused are traumatized. The goal is to heal, not to create a new form of trauma. The child will not be healed by feeling they have finally beaten the beast. This is a parent, after all. It is hardwired in our biology to seek the love and support of this entity. The healing of that trauma comes from the parent giving love and support."

  "Except they don't really give love and support. It's a daydream."

  "Yes, but the psyche doesn't distinguish between the two. In fact, Jung often examined dreams from the perspective that every figure in the dream is a representation of the dreamer. The child who was abused has internalized their abusive parent. In a sense it becomes part of their personality. In order to accept themselves, they must integrate the piece of them that embodies the abusive parent.”

  "Whew,” Lori breathed. “I’m feeling out of my depth here. I don’t understand how we worked through my dreams when I couldn’t remember them.”

  "There are many ways to work with dreams and nightmares we don't remember. In your case, and in many instances with patients who are also children, we focus on art therapy."

  "Art therapy?"

  "Yes, it's a way of bringing that which is unknown into the known. We are bypassing the linear left brain and engaging the artistic right brain. The right brain doesn't need to"—he made air quotes with his fingers—"know the material of the dream. It simply works with the emotion the dream is causing. In your case, terror. There are many kinds of art therapy—sand, clay, painting. You drew pictures."

  "Pictures?"

  "Yes."

  "What did I draw?"

  Chadwick smiled. "I can show you. I don't have original copies—there'd be art pouring from the windows of this building if I saved the creations of every patient—but I did save it for many years and then when we scanned and saved things digitally, I had an assistant put everything into archives. Give me just a moment."

  Chadwick stood and returned to his desk. He drew a very thin white laptop from a drawer and sat it on the desk, opening it.

  Lori studied the large paintings hanging on the walls of Chadwick’s office. There were two paintings, each at least five feet long and three feet wide. One depicted an enormous watery-looking sun suspended above a village. Sinewy rays came off the sun and it seemed to be held up by a floating figure. The second painting portrayed an old man with white hair and a white beard. Enormous wings protruded from his back and he stood as if perched on the top of a small temple. A huge serpent lay coiled in the woods beside him.

  "Those are pictures drawn by Carl Jung himself," Chadwick told her. "He was a magnificent artist with a very creative mind."

  Lori stared at the images for another moment, fascinated, but also a bit creeped out by the pictures.

  "Here we are," Chadwick said. He stood and walked the laptop to Lori. She took it and settled it on her lap. The picture before her was a crude child’s drawing of a tree.

  "This is what I drew?"

  "One of the many pictures. Click the right arrow and you'll see the others."

  Lori clicked the arrow and saw another tree. This time the leaves on the tree were black. In the next picture the entire tree was black. The image after had no tree at all, only a large shadowy blob that looked almost like a figure. The next picture showed the shadow again with more substance. It had legs now, spindly, bony legs and equally bony arms. Four more images matched this one, though the figure appeared to have straggly hair and wore rags. The final image revealed the figure again, but now it seemed to be hunched over and beneath it lay a pool of red that Lori sensed was blood.

  18

  Lori stared at the final drawing and shook her head. "I don't understand what these mean."

  Chadwick took the laptop back. "Shall I print them for you?"

  "Yes, please."

  "They'll print at Darcy's desk. As for their meaning, that's hard to say. The therapy is not designed to search for meaning so much as to help process the emotion contained within the dream. By taking the dream from the shadow and putting it into being, you reduce its potency. Two of the images of the figures you drew, you burned."

  "I burned them? Why?"

  "To destroy them. The figure you drew held meaning that you never fully translated, but the emotion was clear enough. You were afraid of her."

  "Her?"

  "You referred to it as female, yes."

  “It does strike me as a woman, even now,” Lori admitted, considering the picture one more time.

  “Yes, I can see why that connection is there. You said you’ve been having nightmares again, but this time you remember them. Tell me about that.”

  "I'm in my bedroom in the house I lived in when I was a kid, the house I lived in when Bev vanished. I wake up in my bed and I can hear someone eating outside the door."

  "Eating?"

  "Not just eating, crunching, like something hard."

  "Hmmm… I see. That is rather unnerving."

  "At first in the dream, I think it's my little brother, but then I walk to the door and I'm sure… I'm sure something bad is on the other side, something that will hurt me."

  "Do you open the door?"

  "No. I woke up before I opened the door."

  "I want to unpack this dream further. Let's start with what you think is on the other side of the door. Try to go with your first instinct and not analyze it too much."

  "The thing that took Bev."

  "Okay, I see. And do you have a visual for that? Is it a man? A monster?"

  Lori bit her cheek. "I don't know. A monster, I guess. The Dogman was the thing I thought of when I was a kid, so maybe that's what I'm imagining." She said the Dogman, but she envisioned the shrouded entity from her drawings and her mind coughed up a word: witch.

  "Okay, I see. And Bev has never been found, so there's genuinely a mystery here regarding what happened to her?"

  "Yes, she's never been found. We have no idea what happened to her that night."

  "Have you ever tried allowing yourself to believe she left of her own free will?"

  "She didn't."

  "Okay. So, if that's
not something you're comfortable using as a means of shifting the trauma around her vanishing, then the alternative is to accept that something did take Bev that night, in all likelihood someone. Right? If it had been a bear or a forest animal, traces would probably have been found, you would have heard screams."

  "Yes."

  "So you think an individual took her?"

  "That’s the logical explanation."

  "But the mystery of the event has turned an ordinary person—a sick person, sure, but still an ordinary person—into a monster in your nightmares. In order to process your trauma, I would advise you to go back into the dream from a waking state, a daydreaming state, if you will, and open the door to find an ordinary person on the other side."

  "That's it? Imagine I see some guy standing there?"

  "Well, not necessarily. Maybe instead you meet Bev there and she has passed on from this life and she is at peace now and whatever took her that long-ago day is no longer important. What's important is that the thing that happened, whatever it was, is long in the past and you reliving the terror over and over is merely your mind telling you that it's time to heal and move on. Might I ask if anything has occurred recently that might have triggered the dream? Some recent change or trauma? Often these resurfacing fears arise due to major change in our lives—breakups, deaths in the family, that kind of thing."

  Lori sighed. "I broke up with my boyfriend, but this started before that. It started after I heard a story that was eerily similar to Bev's story."

  "A story of another missing child?"

  "Yes."

  "That makes sense then. It would bring all of that old emotion back to the surface."

  "What if the dream is more than that? What if it's trying to show me what happened to Bev?"

  "Then I'd ask, do you think you witnessed what happened that night and blocked it out?"

  "Not really, no."

  "Then how could your unconscious mind give you information it doesn't have?"

  "Well… the same way psychics sometimes know where bodies are buried."

  Dr. Chadwick crossed one leg over the other, considering her with interest. "Carl Jung had dreams that he considered premonitions, dreams that foretold future events. I have worked with scientists and other doctors who consider such phenomena, but ultimately I am out of my league with such things."

  "But you think it's possible?"

  "Probable, no. Possible, perhaps. I am reluctant to eliminate anything as a possibility, but I also believe that attaching to unexplainable phenomena can keep us stuck. Healing comes from bringing what lurks in the darkness into the light, the unconscious into the conscious.

  "The unknown is always scarier than the known. Have you ever researched the Dogman—looked a bit further into the folklore so you might bring him into the light?"

  "He's not real," murmured Lori, thinking about the book in her purse.

  "And yet up here"—Chadwick tapped a finger on his temple—"he is."

  Lori drove home from Dr. Chadwick's office, glancing repeatedly at printouts of the drawings she'd made fifteen years before. The hunched figure seemed distinctly female, but that didn't make it less menacing. There was something savage about the being, though Lori spotted nothing in the unsophisticated drawing to give credence to her feelings.

  She parked at the Mount Pleasant Public Library and walked inside, then paused at a computer kiosk to search for the books she wanted. She searched for Michigan true stories, folklore, and urban legends, jotting down the call numbers for each of the books.

  Lori wandered through the stacks of books, double-checking the slip of paper. There were two books on the Dogman himself and an additional two on Michigan folklore that referenced the beast. Lori found all four books and made her way to a corner table tucked behind shelves containing autobiographies.

  She skimmed through alleged true stories by people who'd encountered the Dogman. The eyewitness accounts described a creature standing nearly seven feet tall with the body of a man, but the head of a dog. He was covered in thick black fur.

  According to one book the earliest sighting of the Dogman occurred in 1887 in Wexford County. Two lumberjacks working in the woods spotted a large creature with a man's body and a dog's head. There were reports of drivers who'd spotted a giant walking dog. Residents who lived near the forest had spotted a half-canine, half-humanoid.

  The stories gave her the creeps, but they didn’t resonate with her dream or with her sense of what happened that night.

  Dr. Chadwick had asked her if she might have witnessed what happened and blocked it out. She hadn’t, of course she hadn’t, and yet a veil seemed to fall when she tried to examine the moments after Bev had climbed into the tree. The memories were there—smashing the mushrooms, calling up the tree to Bev—but… her dream had begun to seep in and pollute her previously clear memory of that night.

  Lori set the book she’d been reading aside and slid another in front of her. On the cover, two glowing red eyes gazed out from a black forest. The title read, Those Who Haunt Us and Hunt Us: The Paranormal and Supernatural in Michigan.

  She scanned the table of contents, eye catching on a story listed on page thirty-eight, ‘The Manistee Hag.’

  She flipped to the page where a black and white drawing showed a haggard woman standing hunched in the woods. Black eyes gleamed from beneath her cloak. In line with the wicked witch images in most fairy tales, she had a long pointed nose flecked with warts and hair. In her bony hands she clutched a skull.

  The Manistee Hag

  Stories of the Manistee Hag date back to the late 1700s.

  Children who played in the woods described a bent woman with black eyes who watched the children from the forest shadows.

  In 1906, a lumberman stormed into a nearby village insisting his daughter was taken by the Manistee Hag. The forest was searched but no sign of the girl was ever found.

  Today the stories are fewer, but they continue to trickle in. This sighting occurred in 1961.

  Two children, sisters, were playing in the forest when they claimed to see a scary-looking old woman emerge from a tree as if she'd been a part of the trunk and simply stepped away from it. Her hair was as wild as brambles, her face as rutted and pocked as the bark, and despite her age she moved so quickly they barely saw her. Suddenly she was just beside them. She reached for one girl child, but the sisters’ dog Tully attacked the hag. The hag, or witch as they later called her, screeched and vanished back into the forest.

  Lori's mouth had gone dry as she read. She closed the book and took her cell phone from her bag. She texted Ben.

  Lori: I've got a weird theory I'd like to pass by you.

  Several minutes passed before Ben replied.

  Ben: I'm on a bike ride heading south. I can stop by your house. Send me your address.

  Lori texted her address, gathered up the books and headed for the checkout desk.

  19

  Ben biked into Mount Pleasant, following the GPS on his phone to Lori’s house. When he arrived, she was standing on the front porch.

  “Want to sit out back?” she asked. “On the deck.”

  “Sure. Let me lock up my bike.”

  “You can just wheel it back here with us,” she suggested.

  Ben followed Lori to the side of the house, where she opened the gate in a chain-link fence and led him into the backyard. The yard was nice enough with a couple of mature willows. A line of overgrown bushes crowded the length of the back fence, obscuring the house behind it. On the raised deck stood a glass patio table lined with beer bottles and cans. A copper ring firepit sitting in the yard contained more empties, as did the yard itself.

  "Have a party?" Ben asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Lori grunted and bent over, snatched up several bottles and walked them to a plastic waste-bin beside the back door. "I put this out here with a bag in it and everything. How hard is it to walk three feet and drop the bottles in? No, I didn't have a party. My inconsiderate downsta
irs neighbor had a party like he does five nights a week. I barely ever come out here anymore because I have to either sit in his trash or clean it up for him."

  Ben grabbed the trash can and carried it to the table. With one swipe, he slid the bottles inside with a crash. "Forget the rest. Let's sit."

  She sighed and touched her stomach, a little quirk he'd noticed she did when frazzled.

  "Why did you do that?"

  "Hmm?" She looked at him, not yet sitting, but still eyeing the cans in the fire pit with barely concealed rage. "Do what?"

  He mimed the movement, grazing his fingers across his stomach.

  She flushed slightly and shook her head. "I didn't realize I did."

  He sensed an untruth in her comment, but based on the color that had risen to her cheeks, he dropped it. "Why do you live here? In student housing, I mean, with a frat boy downstairs?"

  She swiped at her stomach again and settled into the chair opposite him. "I just never left. I moved in here my sophomore year at Central. After I graduated, I got a job, years passed. Here I am."

  "You've never thought of moving?"

  She looked up at a second-story window jutting from the back of the house.

  Ben couldn't see inside. The sun glinted off the glass, turning the window into a mirror. A wistful expression flitted across Lori's face as she gazed at the window.

  "Matilda is probably asleep in that window right now. My cat. Honestly, I think that window is the single reason I've stayed here. It's a bay window and I love to sit there and read and think. Sounds moronic, right?"