Calling Back the Dead: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

by Erickson, J. R.

  “I spoke with Detective Collins this morning.” She came to stand near me, opening the envelope. “He asked about this person. Apparently, he was at the party. Do you recognize him? He was wearing a ninja costume.”

  I glanced at the photograph of a young man. Startling green eyes looked out from his pale face, as if the picture had taken him by surprise.

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “His name is Will. He has a pretty bizarre history with Kerry Manor.”

  “Yeah?” I unloaded several plates, knowing I should listen to Sarah, but I felt as though I were receding down a long dark hallway, getting further and further away from myself.

  “Corrie? Corrie!”

  “Huh?” I snapped my head up and realized she’d asked me something, maybe had been talking for a while.

  “I asked if Sammy ever mentioned him. Maybe he and Sammy had an encounter before that night?”

  I glanced at the picture again.

  “He’s just a boy,” I murmured, rubbing my temple with one hand and bracing myself against the counter with the other.

  “Are you okay?” Sarah asked.

  If I looked at her, her forehead would be marred with little lines of worry.

  “No, I’m fine. I’m going to finish the dishes and take a nap. I’m not feeling well.”

  Sarah

  * * *

  SARAH HUGGED Corrie goodbye and walked to the front door. She opened and closed it with a bang, and then slipped into the hall closet, tucking behind a rack of coats.

  Not sure what compelled her to hide in the house, she waited, listening to Corrie putting dishes in the sink. Sarah could see the great room through a slit in the hall door.

  After several minutes, Corrie walked by clutching one of Sammy’s shirts, breathing in the fabric. Though Sarah could not see her face, she suspected Corrie’s eyes held the same glazed expression that had come over her in the kitchen.

  Corrie sat heavily on the couch. For several minutes she didn’t move, and then something fell to the floor. Sammy’s shirt.

  “One for sorrow, two for mirth.”

  Sarah froze when she heard the song and squinted forward. Corrie sang in the voice Sarah had heard before, a child’s voice.

  Corrie stood, and her body looked different. Her head was high, her eyes bright and fierce. A little smile played on her lips, and she skipped across the room to a playpen in the corner. She reached down and pulled out one of Isis’s dolls.

  Sarah recognized it as the Raggedy Ann doll her mother had given Isis at her last birthday.

  “Dolly’s been bad,” Corrie said, holding the doll out in front of her. “Dolly has to go to the room. Bad Dolly made Mommy drop her ironing.”

  Corrie tucked the doll beneath her arm and bounded from the room, running up the stairs.

  Sarah slipped out, pressing against the wall and listening to Corrie’s footsteps in the upstairs hallway. Stepping lightly, Sarah hurried up the stairs.

  She saw Corrie disappear into the master bedroom. Sarah waited, counting off sixty seconds, and then followed, pushing the door open quietly.

  The room appeared empty. Sarah crept to the bed and peeked beneath it, and then moved to the closet to peer behind Corrie and Sammy’s clothes, her eyes lingering for a moment on Sammy’s Bigfoot slippers.

  Where had Corrie gone?

  Sarah moved along the perimeter of the room, touching the paintings, oil portraits of another time. The huge wardrobe stood near a vanity arranged with Corrie’s makeup and a scattering of Isis’s toys. Sarah looked behind the wardrobe, but found no other door Corrie could have gone through.

  Above her, she heard movement. Had Corrie somehow climbed into the rafters?

  Sarah looked at the ceiling, following the line of footsteps across the room, and then the distinct clap of bare feet on stairs.

  She tiptoed across the room and tucked herself behind the long drapery that shielded the gloomy day.

  A tiny metallic pop met her ears, and then the wall to the right of the wardrobe swung out, revealing a dark staircase.

  Corrie stepped from the shadows, her eyes glassy, one of Isis’s teddy bears clutched to her chest. She looked into the bear’s face, running her hand over the shaggy brown fur. Sarah saw Corrie’s lips moving but could not hear her words.

  A little stone of fear rested in the pit of Sarah’s stomach as she watched Corrie.

  Corrie started to sing, “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” She swayed from side to side, her voice high and unnatural.

  She wandered from the room, petting the bear and leaving the wall open behind her.

  “Three for a funeral, four for a birth,” she sang as moved away down the hall.

  Sarah waited until she heard Corrie’s footsteps on the main staircase, and then quickly shuffled to the dark stairway.

  She crept up the stairs, inhaling dust and a smell of smoke, as if a candle had just been extinguished. At the landing she stared into darkness, fumbling her hands along the wall for a light switch but finding none. She fished out her phone and pressed the flashlight icon.

  She shone the light across the room.

  An old brass bed, child-sized, was tucked in one corner. Several of Isis’s toys lay strewn along the floor.

  On a little table beside the bed lay a doll, odd and misshapen.

  Sarah walked closer and stared at the antique and ugly thing. Its cracked, leathery body looked like real skin, with little patches of matted black fur poking forth.

  “Cat’s fur,” she whispered, imagining who would fashion a doll from the corpse of a cat.

  Someone had sewn hair to the doll’s head and this hair, she was sure, was human. Long and blonde mixed with other colors, what might have been golden red, and darker black shot through with gray. The mother’s hair, she thought.

  Crude mismatched buttons were the doll’s eyes, and a jagged line of red yarn created a mouth twisted in a lopsided smile.

  Beneath her, something banged, and Sarah dropped the doll, startled. She took a moment to understand what the sound had been.

  Corrie had closed the door to the secret room.

  CHAPTER 13

  Now

  Sarah

  Sarah clicked the light on her phone and pressed against the wall, expecting to hear Corrie’s footfalls on the steps. Instead she heard Corrie skipping back down the hallway, the muffled nursery rhyme drifting through the floorboards.

  After several minutes, she turned the light back on, wanting to search the room but overwhelmed with fear that Corrie had just trapped her inside.

  Sarah crept down the steps.

  “I’m fine,” she whispered, nudging her panic aside to focus on the dark wall before her. When Corrie had emerged earlier, she’d heard a click. There had to be a handle of some sort.

  Sarah glided her phone’s light up and down the wall, searching.

  “There’s nothing,” she moaned, feeling a growing heat in the stairwell. She pulled her t-shirt away and waved it, wiping sweat from her brow with her forearm.

  Holding the phone in one hand, she allowed her free hand to roam across the wall, searching for an abnormality, a little crevice, something. Minutes ticked by, but the wall was flat and unblemished.

  She glanced at her phone, knowing there was no reception.

  What would happen if she banged on the door? Would Corrie let her out?

  She leaned forward, resting her forehead against the wall and it swung out, sending her sprawling to the floor in the master bedroom. She rolled sideways and sat up, listening. Had Corrie heard?

  No footsteps started up the stairs, but Sarah waited, oddly afraid that Corrie would step into the doorway at any moment and fix her with that blank stare.

  When her sister-in-law didn’t appear, Sarah hurried from the room and down the stairs. She paused at the great room and then peeked around the corner. No sign of her. From deep in the house, the study perhaps, a high, childlike giggle rang out. Sarah slipped out the door and ran
to her car.

  “I’M HAPPY YOU CALLED.” Brook leaned over Sarah from behind. Her wavy dark hair, streaked with purple, brushed Sarah’s cheek.

  Sarah leaned back against her chair and shut her eyes.

  When she’d returned home from Kerry Manor, she’d dialed Brook without a second thought. Each time she drifted away from the memory of the awful little attic, Corrie’s childlike voice would pop into her mind and conjure the experience again.

  She needed a friend, she needed her twin. He was her sounding board, her voice of reason, but he was dead. She missed him, and the missing had a life of its own - like a ghoul hunkering in the corner, slobbering at her with its needy, desperate eyes. She wanted to shut it in a closet, return to business as usual, get on with the falling-in-love with Brook thing. But she couldn’t.

  She imagined Corrie in that huge, empty house, singing like a little girl. In a day or two, Amy would return Isis, and then what? Was she safe with her mother?

  Brook spun Sarah’s chair around. She straddled her, sitting on Sarah’s lap, and looked into her eyes.

  “I read if you stare someone in the eyes for four minutes, you’ll fall in love with them,” she said, her eyes searching Sarah’s face.

  Brook’s skin was smooth and pale, unblemished. She wore dark eye makeup that caused her green eyes to pop like jewels in her pale face.

  When Sarah had introduced Brook to Sammy at the Halloween party, he called her Elvira and winked at Sarah, hinting that he approved.

  Unlike many of Sarah’s friends, Brook teetered on the edge of something playful and dark. She was not a jock. She wore long necklaces with silver spiders and cat’s eyes. When she’d arrived, Sarah spotted a guitar propped in her passenger seat.

  Despite barely knowing her, Sarah suspected if she confided everything to Brook, she would believe her.

  “Did you know about Kerry Manor before Halloween?” Sarah asked, planting her hands firmly on Brook’s thick thighs. Through her jeans, she felt her warmth.

  “Yeah.” Brook nodded. “I was obsessed with the house for about a year when I was thirteen.”

  “Really?” Sarah asked. “Why?”

  “I grew up in Suttons Bay, pretty close to Northport. Old-timers still talked about Kerry Manor, and kids went up there to peek around. It had the same kind of allure as the old asylum. Abandoned, spooky, the perfect place for a séance.”

  “A séance? You’re kidding, right?”

  Brook turned her eyes into tiny slits and let out a diabolical cackle, leaning her head back and exposing her soft, pale throat.

  “My girlfriend and I conned our neighbor into driving us up there with a Ouija board we bought at Walmart. Scariest half-hour of my life. To be honest, that’s why I went to your brother’s party. Gloria invited me, and I like Gloria, but she’s not the usual type I chum around with, if you know what I mean?”

  Sarah grinned, imagining Gloria pumping her arms as she sped around the skating rink, insisting that all things in life were a competition even if you were traveling in a circle.

  “I can see how that would be the case.”

  “But when she mentioned Kerry Manor, I was all over it. I’d never gotten the house out of my head, and I’d never gone back. Figured if there was a whole house full of people, I’d be safe.”

  Sarah lifted her eyebrows.

  “You were afraid to go back?”

  Brook crawled her hand, thick with silver rings, up Sarah’s arm and traced her collarbone.

  “Yes, I was.”

  Sarah wanted to kiss her, to wrap her arms around Brook and inhale her scent - an alluring mixture of coconut oil and rosemary.

  Brook turned her head to the side.

  “What’s going on behind those chocolate eyes?”

  Sarah sighed.

  “Too much. I want you to tell me what happened at Kerry Manor. Will you do that?”

  Brook frowned and then nodded.

  “Yeah, but let’s crack open that six-pack first. My memory improves after a beer.”

  Brook started to climb off, but Sarah held her in place for another moment. Brook leaned in and kissed her, her lips deliciously soft. Sarah pulled away, knowing if she kissed her much longer, they’d find their way to the bedroom.

  Archie plodded from his dog bed and settled beneath her chair.

  “It was around midnight when we got to the house,” Brook started. “Our neighbor sat in his car and listened to the radio while we snuck in. The house was boarded up, but Kim hoisted me up on her shoulders, and I crawled through a broken window. The house smelled wet and smoky, which seemed strange since the fire happened like a hundred years ago. I had to reach out and pull Kim in through the window too. The second we got inside, we were both scared shitless, but neither of us wanted to bitch out. We set the Ouija down in the big room, probably had a fancy name back in the day. There was some old furniture, spray paint on the walls, a mattress in the corner, which grossed us out pretty good. Your typical abandoned house. We lit a few candles and sat down by the Ouija board, but before we could try it out, we heard someone moving upstairs. It sounded like a little kid skipping. We practically tripped over our own feet running to the window. Kim dove out headfirst and fractured her wrist. I went a little slower, but I swear I heard a little girl coming down the stairs, singing.”

  Brook held up her arm, awash in gooseflesh.

  “Your friend fractured her arm? Because of a noise?”

  Brook rolled her eyes.

  “Fear is a powerful emotion, maybe more powerful than love. Whatever we heard, it wasn’t human, Sarah, and it was real. As real as anything else in this fucked-up world.”

  “What was she singing?” Sarah asked.

  “I couldn’t make it out. A kids’ rhyme, I think.”

  “Did the neighbor take you to the hospital?”

  Brook shook her head.

  “We snuck out. We would have been in deep shit. He took us back to Kim’s house, and we were practically bouncing into the roof of his car with the adrenaline rush. When we got home, we saw Kim’s arm, and by morning it was the size of a baseball. She told her mom she tripped over a pile of laundry.”

  “Did you ever go back?”

  “Hell no. I had to sleep with the light on for a year. I still get the creeps when I hear nursery rhymes. It sounds dramatic, I know, but it left an impression. So, tell me why you’re curious about Kerry Manor. Is it because of your brother, or…?”

  “Obviously it’s because of my brother,” Sarah snapped, immediately regretting her tone. “Sorry. I feel like I’m in an endless loop of acting like an ass and apologizing for it lately.”

  Brook smiled and clinked her can against Sarah’s.

  “I’ve been doing that my whole life. Though I prefer the term bitch.”

  “Thanks,” Sarah said. “I mean it. Thanks for coming here and for not making me feel crazy.”

  “Crazy is subjective,” Brook said. “Now answer me this, Sarah Flynn. Do you think something supernatural killed your brother?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Then

  Corrie

  “I had the strangest dream,” I told Sammy, stopping behind him at the stove and wrapping my arms around his waist.

  “Not another merman dream, I hope? I can’t compete with a Fabio-esque man of the sea.”

  I laughed and leaned my head between his shoulder blades. Several years before, I had dreamed of falling in love with a merman who lived in the great lakes. He took me beneath the water to live in his pearl-walled cave. I told Sammy of the dream, and ever since he claimed to live in terror I would one day abandon him for my dreamland merman.

  “No merman,” I said, sniffing the air. Sammy was making his famous peanut butter pancakes. “I was a little girl living here in Kerry Manor.”

  I moved to the refrigerator and pulled out butter and syrup, setting them on the kitchen counter.

  “It’s grainy, but I was angry in the dream because my older sister had a doll I w
anted.”

  Sammy turned from the stove and cocked an eyebrow. “Maybe a deeply buried subconscious resentment of Amy? Should we call the psychoanalyst?”

  I wadded up a paper towel and flicked it at him.

  “Do we have one of those on speed dial now?”

  He batted it away and nodded.

  “Yes, we do. Gotta make sure my family is well adjusted. For Christmas this year, we’re starting family therapy.”

  “Ha.” I grabbed plates and knives. “I’ll give you some family therapy,” I laughed, holding a butter knife in the air.

  “You wouldn’t,” he groaned, grabbing his chest. “You know if I die first, you’ll be stuck with my ghost.”

  “Well, that’s reason enough to keep you alive. Anyway,” I continued. “In this dream, I wanted my sister’s doll and couldn’t have it, so I killed her cat and made a doll from its skin.”

  Sammy turned, grimacing.

  “Okay, now we’re definitely signing up for family therapy.”

  “Stop it,” I scolded him jokingly. Though a tiny part of me truly wanted him to stop. The dream had unnerved me.

  “Isis still asleep?” I asked him.

  “In the great room. She woke up crying this morning, and you know what’s weird? She wasn’t in her room, but in the bathroom. In the tub!”

  “What?” I asked, frowning. “I’ve never seen her climb out of the crib. How?”

  Sammy shrugged.

  “Apparently you’re both adventurous at night.”

  “I wasn’t last night, was I?” I asked. Several times Sammy had found me sleepwalking through the house at night. It concerned me, but not nearly as much as the thought of Isis making her way to the bathroom in the dead of night. “I don’t remember getting up.”

  “I don’t think so,” Sammy said. “But I slept hard last night. I didn’t even pee.”

  I smiled.

  “That is miraculous.”

  Isis was curled on a blanket in the great room. Sammy had not yet built a fire, and a chill lingered.

  “Hi, Honey Bear.” I lifted her from the floor and carried her to the couch. She turned her sleepy face at me and then dozed back off. I cuddled her, pulling a throw from the floor to smooth over us.