Darkness Stirring: A Troubled Spirits Novel

by J. R. Erickson

  Memories of the day before scattered through her thoughts. Both of them touching each other so gingerly, afraid to hurt the other. And after they’d made love, he’d slept holding her hand. They’d spent the entire day in bed.

  As Ben finished making pancakes, he talked excitedly about places they would go when his body was healed. “You’ve never been to Kitch-iti-kipi?” he exclaimed. “Oh, we’re going. As soon as my knee heals up. You’ve never seen such clear water.”

  Lori’s cell phone rang and she answered it. “Hi, Mom,” she said.

  “How are you, honey? Did you sleep okay?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Lori had called her mother the day before and filled her in on all the harrowing details. Rebecca had wanted her to come right home, but Lori had insisted she was staying at Ben’s.

  “And today? Are you coming here to my and Grandma’s house?”

  Lori wandered out of the room and onto the screened-in front porch. “Probably not, Mom, but tomorrow for sure and then I’ll give you more details.”

  “All right.” Her mother sighed. “They haven’t… they haven’t found Bev at that man’s house, have they?”

  “No, not yet, but if I hear anything I’ll call you first.”

  Lori walked back into the kitchen. Ben had finished his pancakes and two of her uneaten ones as well.

  “I’ve got to go see my mom today. She wants to hear about everything,” Lori lied.

  “Sure, yeah. That makes sense. I’m going to hang out here, I guess. Do some of that R&R the doctor recommended.”

  Lori had found the woman online. She was mentioned on the Find a Grave website for Hector’s mother, who had died years before. The obituary for his mother read, ‘Survived by her son, Hector William Dunn, and her sister, June Kimberly Dunn.’

  41

  Lori found an address for June Kimberly Dunn at the Hidden Pines Retirement Home in Harrison, Michigan. When she requested to see June Dunn at the reception area the woman looked at her as if she’d gone mad.

  “June Dunn?” the receptionist named Heather, repeated back to Lori.

  “Yes, please.”

  “One moment.” Heather picked up a phone and dialed. “Miss Dunn? Yes, I’m sorry. I know that, but you have a visitor. Can she—” The receptionist frowned and set the phone on its case. “She hung up on me, but she didn’t say you can’t come up. Take the elevator to the fourth floor. Miss Dunn is in room 406.”

  Lori rode the elevator to the fourth floor. The hallway floors had been freshly mopped and plastic caution signs were located every few feet as she walked to June’s room.

  Lori knocked and waited. Minutes passed with no answer. She knocked again.

  Finally, the door creaked open and a bony woman with a wilted face glared out at her.

  “Hi, Miss Dunn. My name is Lori Hicks. I’m so sorry to bother you. I hoped to ask you a few questions.”

  The woman leaned heavily on her cane as she moved from the front door of her apartment back through the kitchen and into a dark hallway. She said nothing, but Lori followed behind her.

  Miss Dunn shambled into a dark sitting room and collapsed into the only chair that occupied the space. Lori hovered by the television that played an old black and white movie on silent.

  The woman pinned Lori with her shrewd gray eyes. Her tangled, yellow-white hair clung to her mottled scalp. She was rail-thin and her gnarled hands clutched her cane in front of her. “Go on then. What do you want?”

  “Well, it’s a long story.” Lori smiled, but the woman’s glare only deepened. “I guess I’ll just get straight to it. I met your nephew, umm… Hector, and he said, well, he said that when you were a child something happened to you.”

  “Not something,” the woman hissed. “The witch.”

  “It’s real then?” Lori said, feeling suddenly breathless. "Did you beat her?"

  The woman sneered. She rested her cane against the wall and pulled up the bottom of her skirt, revealing one leg that ended in a gnarled stump. "Not before I fed her."

  Lori stared at the missing limb in disgust, unable to hide her revulsion and disbelief. “But you got away. How?”

  “I took her eye.”

  Lori shuddered.

  The woman laughed and shook her head. "You're not ready for her. I can smell your fear. So can she." The woman started to stand, pushing her scrawny arms on the armrest of her chair.

  "Wait, please. A girl just vanished. Adrian Kranz." Lori fumbled in her bag and took out the picture she'd printed of Adrian. "Please, if there's any chance she's still alive—"

  "Oh, she's still alive," the woman rasped, staring at the photo, though her features did not soften. "Five days. Five days until she'll be ready, but you… you're not strong enough. You're weak and empty and filled with doubt."

  "How do I find her? How did you find her?"

  The woman cackled. "You don't find her. She finds you."

  “The police arrested your nephew. Did you know that?” Lori asked, sure she was violating some confidence by telling the old woman.

  “Good,” she muttered.

  “Do you know why?”

  The woman glared at her. “Because he likes to play witch.”

  “I’m sorry, he likes to play witch?”

  An ugly smile creased the corners of the woman’s mouth. “When I was a girl, we played a game called Boogeyman. One child was the boogeyman and the other children ran and screamed and hid. In Hector’s life the Boogeyman was not a man at all. The boogeyman was the witch… Some children grow to fear such things, others long to become them.”

  “Hector murdered girls so that he could be like the witch?”

  The woman scowled. “Some children are born rotten. They will only ever be rotten.”

  “Did he… help her somehow? Help the witch find little girls?”

  The woman slammed a fist on the arm of her chair, startling Lori. “You think she needs Hector Dunn? That good-for-nothing worm?”

  Lori heard hatred in the woman’s voice, but also a certain grudging admiration for the witch.

  “He had contact with some of the girls, with their families…” Lori murmured.

  “The world is small, girl. It’s small and filled with evil. The kind of evil that knows all, sees all, and takes what it wants.”

  Before Lori returned to Ben’s house, she visited a novelty jewelry shop that sold cheap costume jewelry as well as purses and hair pieces. She searched among the necklaces, found the one she wanted and paid cash at the register.

  When she arrived at Ben’s, he was in the kitchen cooking dinner.

  “Shouldn’t I be doing that?” she asked when she walked in. “I did sign up to be the nurse after all.”

  “The sponge-bath nurse,” he said. “And I might need one of those later.”

  Lori smiled and stopped in front of him, taking a deep breath and gathering herself for what she wanted say.

  “What is it?” he asked, forehead creasing.

  “Today I met with June Dunn. She was Hector Dunn’s aunt and a long time ago she was playing in the woods and the witch abducted her.”

  Ben had been opening a packet of shredded cheese. He stopped and set it on the counter, studying Lori. “Are you serious right now?”

  “Completely. She showed me the stump where her foot used to be. When I was in Hector’s basement there was a shelf filled with books about witches. I asked him about them. He told me about June. I don’t think Hector took Adrian Kranz. I think the witch did and I think she’s still alive, but not for long.”

  Ben laughed. “Do you hear yourself? You can't possibly believe that an evil forest witch is behind the abductions. You said yourself it was Dunn, we nailed him.”

  “What kind of human being could have abducted all the girls?" Lori demanded. "Bev was in a tree, thirty feet off the ground. What man could have climbed into a tree and kidnapped a fourteen-year-old girl without making a sound or leaving a trace?"

  "Lori, twenty-five thousand ki
ds go missing in this country every year. I bet if we looked into those cases, there'd be a hell of a lot who disappeared without a trace."

  “It wasn’t Dunn. He didn’t get Bev. I know it.”

  “You found Meredith Abram in his basement. What further proof do you need?”

  “Meredith was the one girl outside the five-year cycle. He had those books, Ben. His aunt, his mother’s sister, she… she lived through it.”

  “He’s a pedophile, a liar and a murderer. You can’t believe anything he says. He’s filling your head with this shit to throw you off the scent, to keep you from finding—”

  “From finding what? It’s not in our hands now. Detectives are searching his property. What would be the point of his misdirection?”

  “It’s a form of control. He likes to manipulate people. He wanted to scare you down there. He wanted you to question what was right in front of your eyes.”

  “It’s so much more than that, Ben. I was drawing that witch after Bev disappeared. I’ve been dreaming about her. I visited a guy in Idlewild who had a video of her on his trail camera.”

  Ben stared at her, puzzled. “I’m sorry, what? You met someone who claimed to have a video of her?”

  “Yes.”

  Ben frowned and touched his ribs as if they felt tender.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “Yeah, just due for another painkiller. I might have to go lie down for a bit.”

  “I’ll finish this,” Lori said. “You go rest.”

  42

  Ben woke, startled. His stomach twisted inside. From downstairs he heard the radio playing. He couldn't make out the words, but he knew just the same…

  Every step you take…

  His palm hurt. Something sharp poked into the soft flesh and when he lifted his fist and opened it, the unicorn necklace fell onto the bedspread. A pinprick of blood ran from his palm where it had cut into his flesh.

  He lumbered down the stairs and into the kitchen. Lori had left a note, a single sheet of paper folded in half with the words, 'I have to try…'

  He stared at her message, willing it to make sense, and reluctantly he understood. She'd gone to Baldwin, back to the forest. She'd believed the crazy stories of Hector Dunn and his aunt.

  "Damn it," he muttered, sinking onto a stool and staring at the papers on his counter.

  Lori had been doing her own research. While he’d been hunting for sex offenders and pedophiles, Lori had been hunting for proof of the witch.

  Ben gazed at the stories, each occupying its own neat square on the table. Caricature witches leered at him, their crooked teeth and warty noses comical and unnerving. The one thing every image had in common was an ugly misshapen tree looming in the background. As he considered the trees, another tree arose in his mind.

  The tree in the center of the clearing surrounded by the missing person's posters. The deformed tree that looked like it had been dead for longer than it was alive.

  How much of a headstart did Lori have? How long had he been sleeping? It didn't matter. It was a fantasy, a disturbing one, but Lori would drive to Baldwin, get spooked by the night forest and return. He could sit and wait.

  But he couldn't.

  He stuffed his feet into his tennis shoes and walked to his car, cursing her under his breath.

  Lori parked on Tanglewood Drive and turned off the engine. The murky woods hulked beside her. She took the necklace from the box, gazing at the shimmering bell before sliding the chain over her head and stepping from the car.

  As she cut through the trees, she lifted the bell and rang it, shuddering as the tinkle echoed softly in the forest. The rational part of her mind reminded her of how ridiculous this venture was. The frightened part of her mind shrieked for her to run back to the car. But she shut the voices down, set her jaw and continued forward.

  She thought of what Dr. Chadwick had said about active daydreaming, about going back into the dream. She thought she might be able to put herself there and by doing so step from this world into the world of the witch.

  She let her eyes drift half-closed and conjured details of the dream, the red misty forest, the sound of crunching…

  Floating, barely aware of the night sounds around her, Lori walked on. Now and then she heard the tinkle of the bell around her neck, though she hadn’t lifted it.

  Gradually, she registered that the warm red mist no longer occupied her imagination. It surrounded her now, as real as the sky above and the earth below. It was the same forest and yet it was different.

  In front of her, a hut sat atop a nest of gnarled roots. Skulls loomed from stick-spikes surrounding the house.

  Lori walked up the roots like steps to the outer door. She did not knock, but pushed inside.

  Ben parked behind Lori’s car on Tanglewood Drive. He’d dialed her number a dozen times, but she’d never answered and now, as he walked by her car, he spotted her cell phone lying on the passenger seat.

  He trudged through the woods, flashlight scanning, creeped out by Lori's stories despite his best efforts to write them off as centuries-old myths written to scare little children into behaving.

  He walked to the tree, to the spot he thought it had been, but it wasn’t there.

  "What the heck?" He'd been so preoccupied with thoughts of the stories he'd not been paying as close attention as he’d thought and must have gone the wrong way.

  Lori’s breath caught as she stepped into the hut.

  The witch sat in a crude wooden chair, gnawing a bone, gristle still hanging from the tip. Her sharp yellow teeth, moldy green at the gumline, poked and plucked at the meat. Above her maw, a dull black eye watched Lori. The other was a pit of shriveled flesh. The witch’s good eye was quick. It darted around the strange hut, a swiveling snake eye that moved in ways human eyes could not.

  Long curled fingernails, brittle and brown, extended from her crooked hands and she tap-tapped them on the arm rest of her chair. Her tongue was coated in moss, hair like tangled branches, brittle and sharp, a medusa of the forest.

  As in the fairytales, a black cauldron hung above a hearth filled not with wood, but bones. Darkness stirred in the black fatty liquid. It released a putrid odor, a smell of death and fear, a scent that made Lori's stomach twist and churn.

  Ben walked on, a fever stealing in. Sweat rolled down his face. His knee and hip throbbed and the ribs on his right side hummed.

  He thought of the stories of the hikers, of Lori’s own experience of growing sick when they walked through the forest, and he sensed what it was. A defense, a way to keep him back, turn him away from what lay ahead.

  Saliva filled his mouth and he spit it in the grass. He walked faster, though his knee shrieked and his hip muttered and his ribs tried to keep the breath out. The nausea hit in a deluge and he bent over and vomited. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and continued forward.

  "Ben…" The voice came from behind him, small and girlish, but oddly grating. It didn't sound right, the distorted voice so familiar and yet altogether not.

  He turned, dread and anticipation lighting firecrackers in his head.

  Summer stood in the forest behind him. Her form was tremulous and shifting, her face solid and then decayed and then bone and back to solid. Her lips moved but her words didn't line up and he saw a blackness so dark between her lips that he stumbled back. His stiff leg and hip didn't appreciate the sudden movement and he grunted as they seized and sent a molten flash through the right side of his body.

  He fell backward, horrified as Summer streaked toward him. Ben landed hard on his butt and elbows. Pain pinged through the bones of his elbows and into his shoulders, but the fern-covered ground cushioned his fall.

  He snapped his eyes open, expecting her to be gone, but she loomed over him. The stench of her rolled over him and he clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. She smelled like something dead, rotten, but sickly sweet. He gagged, but didn't throw up, crawling away from her.

  "Don't go, Be
n. Come with me. Come with me and we can be together forever." Her whisper came out louder, fiercer, but he struggled back to his feet and ran, though his right leg barely bent and he groaned with every breath. He ran until he could no longer smell her or hear her.

  Lori searched the hut for Adrian, but could not find her.

  The witch extended her fingers and curved her long fingernails around the arm of the chair. For a moment they seemed to grow thicker and sharper, losing their curl and extending out toward Lori like knives.

  "Do you know why I chose these girls?" the witch asked, and her voice rasped in Lori's head like a thousand hornets jostling against a windowpane. “I chose them for their wild spirit, untamed, unhindered. That is a gift that comes easily, unfairly to beautiful girls. But the ugly girls, they must take it, wrestle it out of the black void and consume it.”

  Lori wanted to clamp her hands over her ears, but knew she would continue to hear the witch’s voice in her head. Lori was in her world now and the rules of the ordinary world no longer applied.

  “You know me, girl," the witch went on. "You know this hunger. But they will fill you up, fill you up in ways that nothing ever could, fill that gaping black pit in your soul. You’d never want again. Never hunger again."

  Lori's eyes flickered to the pile of bones and though she tried to look back at the witch, things had begun to take shape and she could not tear her gaze away. Strips of fabric clung to the bones, manes of glossy hair to sightless skulls, and then other things, little colorful things, trinket and shiny bits.

  And then there amidst the bones, Lori saw Adrian. Tear-streaked, eyes swollen, frozen in terror. It was the girl Lori had seen in the posters and yet… she looked as if she’d aged. She held one arm against her chest. Lori stared at the hand resting against Adrian’s t-shirt, realizing two of the girl’s fingers were gone. All that remained were bloody stumps where her pinkie and ring finger had been.