The books appeared to deal with parapsychology and neurochemistry, and were dated to the sixties and seventies. There was a folder full of old newspaper clippings covering various events, some of which featured meticulous notes in the margins. It was one clipping in particular, dated to 1969 and buried some way down in the stack, that told me I'd hit the mother lode.
The headline read “TWO DEAD IN EAST CLEVELAND HOUSE FIRE”.
Pictured were the two deceased victims, a woman and a child. Their names? Geneva and Lacey Corvine.
I studied it for some minutes, taking a seat on the edge of a dusty wooden chair.
CLEVELAND, OHIO—Two people have died in a Cleveland neighborhood after their house caught fire in the night. The victims have been identified as Geneva Corvine (26 years) and Lacey Corvine (4 years). Investigators believe that the fire may have started outside the home on the evening of January 28th, owing to a downed power line in the vicinity. Authorities were alerted to the blaze by a neighbor and firefighters worked for over an hour to combat the fire. Both victims were discovered inside the home in their beds, where investigators believe they succumbed to the smoke. The home, investigators tell us, is a complete loss.
A few things struck me about this news clipping. For one, the corners of the newsprint were faded, as though it had been pinched for long stretches between tight fingers and the photographs on it pored over by wistful eyes. Geneva, Corvine's wife, had been a striking woman with wavy black hair ala Ava Gardner, and their daughter, the 4-year old Lacey, had been cute as a button with bright eyes and her mother's wavy hair—as well as her father's Roman nose. Another thing that stood out was the date of the house fire that'd claimed them—January 28th—which had been circled boldly in black pen, probably by Corvine himself.
I set the clipping aside and started into the folder's remaining contents. There was a lot to sift through, and I wasn't sure that all of the papers were relevant to my investigation. In many cases, I could draw no parallels between the contents of the typed reports and news clippings in the folder and Corvine's experiments. Take, for instance, a faded news clipping dated to December of 1973, discussing the highly anticipated passage of Comet Kohoutek. Why this piece should have been of any interest to Corvine was a mystery to me, and yet lower on the page, at the very end of the article, something caught my eye.
...the comet will attain perihelion on December 28th...
The number “28” was once again circled.
I flipped to the next paper in the stack—an obituary from 1971 for a little-known musician and amateur occultist by the name of Vladimir Sokolov—who'd died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at twenty-eight years old. Once more, the “28” on the page had been circled in bold, black ink.
For some time now, I'd noticed the recurrence of the number 28 in my investigations. No matter where I looked, it kept popping up. March 28th had been the date of the Third Ward Incident of 28 years ago. Enid Lancaster had been 28 years old then. Apparently Corvine had started running into the number, too, and had started making note of it. But what significance did it have? That was the real question. I'd felt like I'd been going crazy up to this point, noticing the number and giving it some kind of mystical meaning, however it seemed that the doctor, too, had fallen under its sway.
The number obviously meant something in all of this, and I was determined to find out what that was.
I kept on through this first folder, finding articles taken from medical journals and such stuffy-sounding texts as EXPERIMENTS IN CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY, which dealt with such varied subjects as insulin therapy, sensory deprivation, the development of nootropic drugs in Belgium, mind-control experiments in the USSR and more. There were pages torn from books—Descartes' The Passions of the Soul and Treatise of Man—which featured several passages concerning the Pineal gland, underlined in black ink. Pages from Franklin Wainwright's well-known book, Stirrings in the Black House: The Newberg Murders, which discussed a series of ritualistic murders that took place in the city of Newberg, Oregon in 1972 were included in the pile, and lines regarding the cultists' beliefs in reincarnation had been underlined. Notes, too, had been taken in the margin, with one scrawl in particular drawing my eye. Carte de Umbra Lungi. What that meant I was unsure. It was another language, one I was unfamiliar with.
The sense all of this research gave me was of a man desperate for answers, and the bent of his reading gave me a working theory towards his reasons for first dabbling in the experiments that would ultimately result in the Third Ward Incident. Corvine, by all accounts a brilliant physician, had lost his family. Consumed by loss, he'd set out on a wide-ranging quest for knowledge. What he'd hoped to do with that knowledge I was uncertain. Perhaps he'd wished to find a way to make himself forget the pain, or else he thought he could—through the utilization of outre and experimental techniques—bridge the gap between the living and the dead and reach out to his deceased loved ones.
While sifting through all of this research, I became increasingly aware of a presence in the room with me, or perhaps watching me from just outside the cabin's only window. Repeated glances over my shoulder brought nothing to light; the night outside was still, except for the odd branch sent raking over the exterior of the cabin in the breeze. Even so, the feeling of being watched—actively hunted—persisted. At one point I stood and approached the window, looking out at the inky line of trees beyond my car and studying the black slivers of night between the aged trunks. The eyes I'd felt certain to find staring back at me never turned up, though. I was alone. My senses all assured and reassured me of that fact.
Well, except for one of them.
It wasn't a sense so much as it was intuition, a nagging feeling in my gut, that something lurked just around the corner. I should have known by then that the eyes had their limits. Something dangerous could loom near without my ever seeing it, as I'd learned at the asylum. Shaking off a chill, I returned to the desk.
I leafed through the other books on the desk. They dealt mostly with the psychological subjects I mentioned before, though at the bottom of one of the stacks I discovered something like a nature guide, old and faded, which detailed the flora and fauna of the Hiawatha region. Its print was worn, as were the hand-drawn illustrations of trees and birds within. I leaned back to have a better look at this one, and felt the floor sagging deeply beneath one of the chair legs.
Standing and pushing the chair aside, I examined the floor with my light and centered my gaze upon one particular plank. It was the right size, and would have looked just like all the others if not for a slight difference in color—a difference which became all the more apparent after I cleared away a good deal of dust. It was a natural brown, compared to the regular stained chestnut of the rest. Testing it with my hands, I found it extremely loose at both ends. It'd been hastily nailed down. Corvine hadn't been the handiest when it came to repairs, it seemed.
Another possibility crossed my mind and sent me feeling out the borders of this aberrant plank. It was a long shot, but maybe something had been hidden here. I gave the edge of the board a pull without stopping to consider what I might find.
It came up without difficulty. I tossed the plank aside and leveled my light on the subfloor space beneath, where I discovered what appeared to be a box.
I'd stumbled upon Corvine's buried treasure, by the looks of it.
11
Before reaching in and removing the box, I had to shoo away an especially persistent—and enormous—wolf spider who seemed keen to use the thing as its perch. When the thing crawled away into the blackness, I lifted the box, made of a dense cardboard, and set it out on the floor. It was about the size of two regular shoeboxes, and had a dirt-colored handprint across its lid, which had been fastened down with twine.
I yanked my knife out of my pocket, rather pleased to see it getting some use, and made quick work of the twine. Before opening the box however, I took some time to study the handprint. It was large, came from a hand bigger than my own, an
d as I traced its shape with my finger I couldn't help but picture Dr. Corvine kneeling upon this very floor, stashing it away so that it would never be found. Whatever was in it, he'd obviously wished to keep it hidden. Hoping that I wouldn't find a box full of bones, I pulled off the lid and had a look inside.
The box didn't have any human remains in it, but its contents were hardly less exciting to me.
Cassette tapes. Six or seven of them. Handwritten notes, photographs and what looked like a blueprint were also included.
“Jackpot,” I muttered, setting the box in front of the typewriter and returning to my chair.
At the very top, folded in half, was a handwritten note. The paper had a rough feel to it—decades stashed away under the floor hadn't done it much good—and the ink was a bit blotchy. The penmanship had been incredibly neat however, and once I'd mentally reacquainted myself with the flow of proper cursive, I found I could read it without difficulty.
It read thus:
It is for good reason that men fear the dark. Our kind are transient, hopeless things. Things destined to live and die, leaving nary an echo in the yawning corridor of eons. I've always marveled at time, and at its ability to change things—to worsen, weaken and, however seldom, to improve—despite its intangibility. The cruelty of this world is that there is nothing in it that equates to permanence, and it is the burden of our kind to be saddled with—cursed by—that knowledge. The only commodity that endlessly endures is that invisible force that turns the pages; time.
That, and one other.
While a man may be consumed and erased by the machinery of time, there are things in these vast cosmos, in the spheres beyond our feeble scope, that know nothing but to endure. It is of these things, and not the dispensable souls of humankind, that I have become acquainted with through my ill-advised research.
The door has been opened.
It's already too late.
W. R. Corvine, March 31st, 1989
I stared down at the page for some time, re-reading it and then setting it back into the box. In the meantime, a terrible chill had settled along my spine. I glanced, not once or twice, over my shoulder and to the window, where I felt sure something unseen had grown closer to the cabin.
The note was a doozy—cryptic and somewhat disjointed. But I gleaned from it a few important points. Firstly, judging by the date on that note, Corvine had returned here after the events at Chaythe Asylum. Before the authorities caught a whiff of what he'd really done, he'd taken his research—some of it seemingly in this very box—and vanished to Hiawatha. Also, whatever his goals had been at the onset of his research, it was clear he didn't meet them. The fact that he'd called his work “ill-advised” was telling.
The last thing that struck me, and which was most responsible for my unease, were those final lines.
The door has been opened.
It's already too late.
Corvine knew he'd fucked up royally in carrying out these experiments. He'd learned, too late, that his experiments on Enid had backfired and that he'd released the Occupant.
And apparently, the guy responsible for all this had no answers. To hear him tell it, it was too late to do anything about it. We were stuck with whatever it was he'd loosed upon the world.
That wasn't exactly comforting.
I returned to the box, had a look at the tapes. Their labels bore the mark HIAWATHA. These, then, were probably the sessions Corvine had carried out here, in the cabin, with his first subject in the 70's, prior to working at Chaythe Asylum.
The paper I'd initially taken for a blueprint was in fact a detailed sketch of a large, egg-shaped room. It took me a few minutes to recognize it, but as I studied its dimensions and spotted the little observation shack in the rear—the examination chair at the center—I saw it for what it was. These were plans, schematics perhaps, for that chamber beneath the asylum where Jake and I had found Elizabeth. There were some other things in the box as well—several sheets of crinkled paper crammed with complex chemical formulas on them. They had no heading or attribution; I could have been looking at the chemical formulas for Agent Orange or Grape Kool-Aid.
The pictures in the box weren't actually pictures, but rather, drawings. There were probably a dozen in total, and they'd been done on nice, thick card stock with quality pencils. Beneath each sketch were hard to read signatures, two in total, which seemed to point to the drawings as a kind of collaborative effort between two artists.
The subject of those pieces, however...
All twelve of the drawings were of faces, and they seemed to be stacked in order of increasing clarity and detail. The very first among them, signed J.C., was an airy thing that gave only the general outlines of the human face. The next five, also signed with the initials J.C., were variations on the same figure, but with more detail added each time. The face began thin, but grew thinner in subsequent drawings. The facial features seemed to have an inverse relationship to the increasing hollowness of the face, in that they only grew. Eyes and mouth were pushed beyond the boundaries of normal human physiognomy until they appeared cartoonish.
But it wasn't until I got to the latter half of the drawings—the six signed with the initials E.L.—that I knew what I was looking at.
The first of the drawings attributed to the artist E.L. seemed to pick up where the last of J.C.'s work left off, in that the details of the face—their subject had evidently been the same—continued their development into nightmarish distortion. But I hadn't even reached the last of the drawings before I recognized the subject.
The Occupant.
The artists had been tasked with drawing the thing we'd seen at Chaythe Asylum, and by the time I looked at the twelfth and final drawing done by artist E.L., which almost certainly stood for “Enid Lancaster”, I found myself transported back to the shadowed institution. The details were spot on, damn near photographic. The realism of the distorted face, with its two misshapen eyes and yawning mouth was such that I thought I could almost feel it staring at me from the page. The first drawings in the sequence by J.C.—less clear and detailed—had probably been the work of Corvine's first subject; the one whose progress would likely be chronicled on the tapes I'd just found.
I hurriedly tucked the awful drawings away and picked the tapes out of the box.
Outside, the wind picked up and the cabin began to groan as though it might shudder and fall. With the tapes in hand, I made a hasty run to the car for my tape recorder, and sitting in the driver's seat with a lit Viceroy, I loaded the first tape, labeled HIAWATHA #1, into the player.
The smoke in my lungs was just about the most comforting thing I'd encountered all day. Putting the seat back a little to soothe my achy spine, I flicked a cone of ash out the window and hit PLAY.
From the very beginning, I could tell that these dictations were going to be less formal than the one I'd heard from Corvine's time at Chaythe Asylum. His voice drifted into the air, filling the car, and I bristled at the sound of it.
“Janie, are you ready?” asked the doctor.
There was another voice on the tape, that of a young woman, that replied, “Yes.”
“We're going to start now. If there are any spirits on these grounds, we wish to make contact with you. Please, give us a sign,” said Corvine.
I couldn't help but laugh. Corvine and his assistant, Janie, were doing the same thing that Elizabeth had done back at the asylum. They were hunting for EVPs. Compared to all of the esoteric shit the doctor would get up to later on, the idea of him holding a tape recorder and conducting a séance in the cabin was hilariously quaint.
“If there is someone here—the spirit of one who is deceased, please, show yourself. Give us a sign,” continued Corvine.
There was silence on the tape while Corvine and Janie waited with bated breath for something. “Please, if you're here, show yourself,” added the girl.
Chuckling, I ashed my cigarette once more and leaned forward in my seat, looking to the cabin with a grin. Ye
ars ago, Corvine and this young woman had been standing in that very cabin, playing with tape recorders and calling out to spirits. For what reason? It seemed so ludicrous that I could barely believe what I was hearing.
And then I glimpsed something in my periphery. Something that nearly made me swallow my cigarette.
I reached out and hit the STOP button on the tape player, letting it clatter to the car floor.
In the cabin window was a silhouette so faint that I could only make out a few details—dark hair, thin arms, skin so pale it glowed in the dark—and yet it wasn't so faint that I could possibly doubt its being there. Someone was watching me from inside the cabin.
12
I wanted to start up the car and put the pedal through the floor, but I couldn't even remember where I'd put my keys. Staring out my window at the motionless figure in the cabin, my pulse started thumping in my temples so hard I feared I might stroke out. The cigarette between my fingers continued to burn, singing my fingertips, but I hardly noticed.
It's the coat rack, remember? I tried to tell myself that I wasn't seeing anything sinister in that window; that it was merely some everyday object rendered in darkness. Would that I could have let myself believe the lie.
Because let me tell you something about coat racks: They can't stare.
I'd stood in that very spot not so long ago and knew the coat rack—or any other fixture that could possibly pass for a person in the right light—to be far from the window. What I was seeing now was a pale, unmoving thing. Dark hair kept its face mostly obscured, but there was something familiar in its general shape, its overall posture, that called to mind the Occupant.
I looked away, my eyes grazing the box of tapes I'd brought with me, and in it I glimpsed the edges of those drawings Corvine's subjects had done—in particular one of the later efforts by Enid, whose frightful details jumped off of the paper in the low light.
Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2) Page 5