Dead Stream Curse: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “Sure.” She handed Stephen the stone. It wasn’t as if he’d know what to do with it, anyway.

  He turned the stone over several times, rubbing his hand over the smooth edge.

  “What’s a hag stone, then?” he asked, handing it back to her and already shrugging out of his clothes.

  They’d met at the pond every day for a week now, and Stephen no longer blushed when she stripped down to her undergarments.

  Liv considered how to explain it.

  “Some people believe they’re magic.”

  He perked up at the comment and leaned in for a second look at the stone.

  “Magic, how?”

  Liv shrugged.

  “Sometimes when people look through them, they can see things.”

  “May I?” He held out his hand again, and Liv pulled the stone away.

  “You have to catch me first.”

  She jumped off the rock and ran down the dock, diving into the pond and swimming fast. She heard Stephen’s dive follow her own.

  Suddenly a hand grabbed her ankle and pulled her beneath the water. She almost kicked out, but instead spun and put both hands on Stephen’s shoulders. She popped above the water and leveraged up, pushing him down. He thrashed away from her, and she realized he was panicking. When his head shot above the surface, his eyes were filled with terror, and he coughed and hacked as if he’d taken in a mouthful of water.

  “What’d you do that for?” he yelled, kicking away from her. He climbed from the pond and kneeled on the bank, continuing to cough.

  She followed, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped, remembering his story of jumping off the cliff. She should have known better.

  He rubbed his throat, and when he looked at her, she saw red blisters inflamed on his lips.

  She put a finger to his lower lip, but he jerked his head away.

  The blisters had not been there the day before.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  Liv thought back to the previous day and the angry tone of his mother.

  “She saw me, didn’t she? You mother?”

  He didn’t look at her but nodded.

  “Does she hurt you, Stephen?”

  He glared at her and then stood.

  “I don’t feel like swimming today.”

  He stalked back to his clothes and grabbed them before disappearing into the trees.

  She almost let him go. Years later, she would reflect on all those chances to turn the other way and let their friendship dissolve as quickly as it took shape.

  Instead, she followed him.

  “Wait,” she called. “I’ll show you how to use it.”

  He continued walking — stomping, really — and then slowed, turning back.

  “How to use what?”

  She held up the hag stone.

  His eyes narrowed on the stone. The ugly blisters on his lips had paled, but when he bit his lip, he winced.

  “Okay, yeah, sure.” He strode back to her and held out his hand.

  She dropped the stone in his palm, ignoring George’s voice in the back of her head.

  “I need a drum,” she told him.

  “A drum? And you think we might find one lying around in the woods?”

  She smiled and shook her head before walking to a tall, leafy fern. She pulled the largest leaf from the bunch.

  “Now, something hollow,” she murmured, walking around the forest and kicking at downed trees. She walked back to the lake and pulled branches from a weeping willow. Weaving several branches together, she made a frame, and then stretched the leaf over the branches, securing it by tucking the leaf’s edges into the braided wood. When she bounced her finger on it, a barely audible ping reverberated out.

  Stephen stood back, watching with interest.

  “Not much of a drum,” he murmured.

  “The best kind are born of necessity,” she told him, repeating words George had told her more times than she could count.

  She paused and gazed toward the lake, and then back into the forest.

  “I think right here beneath this willow,” she said. “This is the best spot.”

  “For what?”

  “To call in the spirits.”

  He gaped at her and then gazed beyond her, as if he expected to see one such spirit gliding across the lake toward them.

  “As in dead people? Ghosts?”

  She laughed.

  “As in ancestors. They lived once, but it was a very long time ago.”

  Liv settled on a patch of grass and placed the makeshift drum in her lap.

  “What should I do?”

  “Sit.” She patted the space beside her. “And look through the stone.”

  Stephen held the stone up to his eye, and Liv began to drum her fingers on the leaf. The sound was small and seemed swallowed by the crickets and birds, but slowly the resonance seeped in.

  She felt the drumming in her blood, in her heartbeat. The steady throbbing pulse as it pulled her deeper, until her eyes drifted closed and she swayed with the sound. The voices of the spirits rose in a steady hum.

  Beside her, Stephen let out a little gasp.

  She tried to open her eyes, to ask him what he saw, but the drumbeat pulled her down and down. She did not fly, but sank. The voices rocked her, lulled her, but soon they shifted, their tones no longer warm and comforting. They seemed to be shrieking at her.

  “Go away, go away, go away…” the words flowed together, stretched long and angry.

  It took her a moment to understand. The spirits didn’t want her there.

  Her eyes popped open, and she saw that Stephen had shifted to his knees, the hag stone pressed so tightly against his eye, the surrounding skin bulged. She could see the pale blue of his eye peering through.

  He gasped and fell back, throwing the stone away.

  Liv watched him, dazed. The thick, murky darkness she’d been plunged into had not fully released her.

  For a moment, they both sat unmoving, lost in their separate reveries.

  “What did you see?” Liv asked him.

  She pushed the drum off her lap, and then wrenched the leaf free of the branches.

  He swallowed and touched a finger to his blistered lips before shaking his head, as if banishing the images.

  “I don’t know… I-”

  “Never mind,” Liv said quickly. She realized she didn’t want to know what was responsible for the haunted look in Stephen’s eyes.

  He said nothing, and then a grin slid over his face.

  “That was amazing,” he breathed. He gazed into the distant sky, again lifting his fingers to his lips. “You’re magic.”

  Liv smiled, no longer scared by the angry voices of the spirits. Stephen’s giddiness enveloped her.

  “You don’t think it’s weird?” she asked, gesturing to the stone and the bent sticks from the drum she’d already destroyed.

  “It’s incredible. You’re incredible.”

  A little tremor passed through her at his words.

  “I’d like you to meet someone,” she told him.

  Chapter 12

  August 1945

  Liv

  “Hurry,” Liv called as the train started to pull away. “We’ve got to catch it on the fly.”

  They waited in the trees, and then ran together toward the last car on the freight train.

  Liv jumped onto the little ladder that clung to the back and shoved the door open. She swung inside. Stephen ran along behind the train, his face determined as he sprang onto the ladder.

  He hurtled into the dusky interior, grinning.

  “Hot damn! We just jumped on a train. We’re like stowaways,” he laughed.

  Liv grinned and leaned back against a bag of corn.

  “No bulls on this line of freights, either, so we don’t have to keep a lookout,” she told him.

  “What are bulls?” he asked, settling on a sack of c
orn beside her.

  “They’re guards who throw people without tickets off the trains. Sometimes they club ya, too.”

  Stephen grimaced and glanced toward the open door.

  “Has that ever happened to you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I know which ones to ride. George taught me years ago. We didn’t ride much, but when we did, we steered clear of any trains with bulls.”

  “Your uncle sounds sharp. I can’t wait to meet him,” Stephen said, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head.

  * * *

  “Time to jump,” Liv announced. They walked to the edge of the train car. It was moving along, not fast, but quickly enough that she felt a little tremor of exhilaration as the ground passed by.

  “On three,” she said.

  They counted together, “One, two, three!” They jumped, landing in a thicket of leaves at the edge of the forest.

  “This way?” Stephen asked skeptically as Liv led him into the trees. “Your uncle lives in the boondocks.”

  Stephen jumped when a twig cracked nearby.

  George stepped from the shadow of trees.

  He was tall with dark hair and a dark beard and wore clothes he made himself from the hides of animals and the fabric Liv brought him a few times a year. A deerskin bag was slung across his chest.

  “George,” Liv beamed. She walked forward, and he embraced her, but Liv felt the rigidity in his shoulders.

  “Listen, Völva,” you must go home,” he told her, pulling her away and looking into her face.

  “But George, we hopped a train. We rode the rails to get here. I want you to meet my friend Stephen,” she argued.

  George frowned over her shoulder.

  She glanced back at Stephen, who stood with his hands stuffed in his pockets, his face sooty and scraped.

  “I’ll walk you into town. There’s a bus that leaves in an hour,” George insisted.

  “George-”

  “Don’t argue with me, Volva,” he growled, and she clamped her mouth shut.

  He rarely rose his voice, and her face grew red.

  She walked back to Stephen and shrugged.

  “I guess it’s not a good day,” she lied.

  “Did he call you Vulva?” Stephen asked with a sneer.

  Liv laughed and rolled her eyes.

  “Volva. It’s a Norse word.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Liv paused and half-considered a lie.

  “Witch,” she admitted, realizing in that tiny confession how much she trusted Stephen.

  George, apparently, did not.

  As they walked into town, Liv and Stephen stuck out their thumbs, giggling and complaining when cars passed them by.

  “You’d rather ride?” George asked, after several minutes of their antics.

  “My feet are killing me,” Stephen admitted.

  George looked pointedly at Stephen’s once shiny, now scuffed loafers.

  George disappeared into the forest for several minutes. He emerged with a handful of fine green ferns. He held the plant near his face before tossing it on the road.

  A truck ambled down the road, and Liv quickly stuck her thumb out. The driver pulled over.

  “In the back,” the driver called.

  The three scrambled into the bed of the pickup.

  “What was that?” Stephen asked, nodding toward the ferns the truck had run over just before stopping.

  “Dill,” Liv told him.

  As they bounced along the road into town, Liv tried to fill the strained silence.

  George’s displeasure was plain, and Liv vacillated between angry and embarrassed at his poor treatment of Stephen.

  “Stephen goes to a private school, George. He’s going to the University of Michigan in the fall.”

  “And how did you find Liv?” George asked, directing his gaze steadily at Stephen, who seemed to shrink smaller within his skin.

  “He rescued me,” Liv announced, tilting her chin up. “He saved me and Arlene from drowning in the Dead Stream. If he hadn’t shown up, we both would have drowned.”

  George flicked troubled eyes to her.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Last Saturday,” Stephen offered.

  George shifted his attention to the trees. Liv knew he was searching for his own signs of their misfortune, but like her, she thought he found none.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” George asked.

  Liv clutched the tailgate as the truck bounced over a bump in the road.

  “I forgot,” she told him, and she had.

  The truck deposited them in front of the Kalkaska Tavern and drove off.

  George fished some money out of his pocket.

  “Go have a sandwich and a Coke. I will get your bus tickets,” George told them. He stuffed a few quarters in Liv’s hand and walked off without another word.

  “I think it’s safe to say he doesn’t like me,” Stephen said after their hamburgers arrived.

  * * *

  “Why can’t we go to the cabin, George? I told Stephen I’d show him the bones.”

  George studied her, a worried look in his eyes.

  “Volva, you shouldn’t have brought him here.”

  “But why?” Liv demanded, growing frustrated at George’s lack of kindness toward her new friend, her only friend. “He’s my friend.”

  George shook his head.

  “I won’t speak about this right now. Go.”

  George inclined his head toward the bus, where Stephen stood with their tickets.

  Liv stormed away, not looking back as she and Stephen climbed on the bus and pulled from the station.

  Chapter 13

  September 1965

  Mack

  Mack read a few chapters of Peyton Place; a paperback abandoned by Diane during their last attempt at reconciliation. They’d gone to the cabin with a teaspoon of hope and a bucket full of resentments and bruised egos.

  They squabbled over petty things for three days, until Diane finally threw up her hands and stormed into the summer woods, disappearing into the dense foliage moments after she walked out the door.

  Mack thought of going after her. Misty barked and howled at him like she could hardly believe what a jackass he was being, but he had his own streak of stubbornness. He sat in a chair outside and waited until Diane wandered back two hours later, dirty, sweat-streaked, and puffy-eyed from crying.

  They had driven home in silence.

  A week later, Mack had gotten drunk and smashed Diane’s glass swan under his boot.

  When Diane left with her bag, Mack had still believed it wasn’t the last, last time. People in denial never do. He’d seen it with his own drunken dad a dozen times, at least. His mother bruised, lips bleeding, insisted she was done, her husband could go to hell. She’d pack their things and rush her little family out the door.

  Two weeks later, Mack, his little sister Kate, and their mom would move back in. His dad would have bought flowers, cleaned the house, and put on a white button-down shirt.

  Two weeks after that, he’d stumble in, stinking of whiskey, with a mad gaze searching for someone or something to punch.

  Mack’s mom finally left after his father broke her arm. He grabbed her and snapped her wrist because she’d poured out a bottle of scotch she’d found in his sock drawer. Mack was fifteen by then, and despite his insistence he’d never be like his dad, the damage was done. Somewhere in his brain, wires had fused together, telling him just a little nip took the edge off.

  His mom died five years after her flee to freedom in a car accident, and his father, dead now two years himself, had mourned her for a decade.

  It was a sad story, and a confusing story that Mack never quite got the lesson out of. His mother, after finally liberating herself from the monster, died at the start of her new life, burned slowly in a heap of twisted metal as rescuers attempted to save her and failed.

  Mack threw Peyton Place on the floor and went
to the cupboard. Three half-bottles of booze stood inside. He selected the Johnnie Walker scotch and poured a glass to the brim, swallowing half in a single gulp. Fire roared through his belly. The loneliness rising up at the memories of Diane, and his mother, coiled back down and went to sleep.

  He finished the bottle and walked with surprising steadiness to his bed, closing the door and not bothering with the lock. His drunkenness made the previous day’s fears into a mirage of the mind, no greater terror than the terror itself. He laid in his bed, fully dressed, planting a foot on the floor to steady the swaying of the room. Misty hopped in the chair, curled her tail over her face, and they both fell asleep.

  He couldn’t say what woke him, but it wasn’t the need to piss. More like the strand of a dream jumping across the void into the here and now, rousing Mack from a deep, inebriated sleep.

  “Huh?” he said, as if in answer to a question that hadn’t been asked.

  And then to his bleary dismay, a guttural whisper replied.

  “Mine…” the voice rasped.

  Misty growled from the corner, and Mack fought up from the abyss of sleep, eyes blinking in the darkness; his head was impossibly heavy on the pillow.

  As his eyes adjusted, a figure took shape, and Mack froze.

  The man towered over him, and in the pale light of the moon, Mack could make out portions of his shadowy face: skeletal, flesh hanging loose, sunken eyes in a bone-white skull.

  “Mine…” the thing told him, and Mack knew that it was the dead man at his bedside.

  The dead man from the woods.

  Misty had not moved from her chair, but she stood, ears raised, emitting a deep growl.

  Mack watched thread of saliva, silvery in the moon’s glow, drip from her muzzle.

  “Mine,” the man hissed.

  Mack smelled the dead man’s decayed breath as it blew out icy cold from his lipless mouth.

  He rolled from the bed and thudded to the floor.

  Terror poked tiny holes in the veil of drunkenness that blanketed Mack as he crawled toward the door, jumped up, and wrenched it open.