Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2)

by Ambrose Ibsen

  When next I peered into the cabin window, it was empty. My guts roiled and my hands moved impulsively to the wheel, squeezing it. Hold yourself together... you're out here all alone. Your mind is playing tricks on you...

  All of this internal chatter was nothing but useless noise. There was something out here with me, despite my remoteness, and I'd felt it for some time. Perhaps it'd always been with me, had hitched a ride some time ago.

  Maybe I'd led that monstrosity back here from the front entrance of the asylum.

  From one of the bottles I'd packed, I splashed some cold water on my face and tried to calm my nerves. Repeated studies of the cabin and its sole, moonlit window yielded nothing.

  Was it still watching me from somewhere, perhaps within the treeline? I clutched at the Maglite, made sure the knife was close at hand, and opened the car door, stepping out.

  I picked up the tape recorder, too, stuffing it into a pocket.

  Trawling the wilderness with my light, I brought up nothing but a nightmarish Bob Ross painting. Lots of happy—or not so happy—trees. The door to the cabin sat ajar, and I told myself it'd been knocked open by the wind, or else I hadn't closed it properly on my way out. Striding towards the window, I held my breath and had a look inside, fearing that I might find the Occupant staring back at me from somewhere within.

  My search turned up the tottering desk, the ash-filled hearth, the goddamned coat rack, but nothing else. It was empty.

  I sighed, worked out the tightness in my chest with my palm as I stepped back towards the door. Slipping into the cabin, I shut the door behind me—firmly—and had another look around, one hand poised to draw the knife. Thankfully, there was no one waiting for me inside, no one to shank. Everything was as I'd left it.

  Even so, I knew better than to trust my eyes. I started across the room, plopped down into the chair. For some minutes I sat in silence, merely studying the room's corners, its nooks and crannies, in anticipation of the predator I knew to lurk there. None turned up.

  When I'd calmed down and hesitantly written off the sighting as a byproduct of my fatigue, I sat back in the chair and fished the tape recorder out of my pocket, continuing where I'd left off. Corvine's deep voice drifted from the speaker and startled me.

  “Please, give us a sign.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is it working?” asked the young woman, Janie.

  “We won't know until we've listened to the tape afterward,” explained Corvine. “These things take time. I understand that it takes considerable energy for a spirit to bridge the gap between worlds.”

  The session went on for fifteen or twenty minutes, and as I listened to the playback I heard nothing like an EVP. The only voices on that tape were those of Corvine and his helper. Following a break in the tape, a new recording began. This time, it was just Corvine dictating.

  “The methods employed here at Hiawatha have not been effective. In Elmore I was able to pull the voices of the dead from the air, but here we've encountered some difficulty. The spirits here don't seem to want to communicate. I find this hard to believe, considering where this cabin is situated. This land, the very soil that rests beneath it, is no stranger to spilt blood. It is well-known that a logger in the 19th century once murdered an amorous rival here—and for centuries before this land was a site of war between different indigenous factions. The spirits of the dead, such as they exist, must be plentiful here. And yet, they do not speak.”

  Another session began, this one also featuring solely the doctor.

  “I've recently become acquainted with a technique by which one may tap into the inner workings of the mind—a deprivation experiment meant to manipulate the senses and induce what some believe to be spectral hallucinations. I speak of the 'Ganzfeld Effect'. I intend to employ this technique during my next session with Janie. Perhaps she will be a more effective receiver for the voices from beyond than these tapes have been. Visual and auditory phenomena are not uncommon during such experiments.”

  During the next session, Corvine discussed his progress with Janie, as well as his reading about new, experimental drugs.

  “Of all the experimental substances coming from Europe—that class of drugs which has been dubbed 'nootropics'—there is one which has captured my interest. It is a mixture comprised of certain Racetam-class drugs, coupled with a dose of the neuropeptide Scotophobin. This combination, the early clinical trials have made clear, is a promising one for those who wish to stimulate that psychical center of the brain, the Pineal gland. The so-called 'third eye' discussed in various cultures throughout history may finally open, and Descartes may well be proven correct in his declaration of the Pineal as the seat of the human soul. It is my hope that a dose of this compound—whose analog even now I have requested from a reputed local chemist—will deliver a breakthrough. Used in tandem with the Ganzfeld technique, which cuts off the feeble, mammalian senses, I except that the extrasensory capacities of the Pineal gland will make themselves known and give the subject a new vantage point from which sensory feedback from other realms may be gleaned.

  “The clinical trials make note of one temporary side-effect, a crippling phobia of darkness. Promisingly, the trials—despite having administered very large doses of the mixture, dubbed SPN—002—have not found an upper tolerable limit. This bodes well, and speaks to the compound's safety. There are no concerns for toxicity.”

  The tape wore on. Corvine documented Janie's first experiences with the Ganzfeld technique, describing his process. Initially he stuck to the guidelines found in psychotherapy texts, but soon deviated from the prescribed norm because he felt his own variation to produce more noticeable effects. The subject was seated in a chair and blindfolded—probably in the very same chair I now sat in—and a pair of large headphones were placed upon her ears to block out all noise. She was then urged to remain completely still, and to focus only on the darkness. “Let your physical self drift away,” he instructed on the tape.

  Initial forays into the Ganzfeld technique proved fruitless. Though some low-level hallucinations did seem to occur, they did not, as Corvine had hoped, “Pull away the veil between the two worlds.” Sessions continued in this way, with only minor progress, and the doctor could be heard to grow increasingly irritated until, on the next tape, he began chronicling their usage of the experimental compound SPN—002.

  Five minutes after dosing, Janie was instructed to sit down, took on the usual blindfold and headphones, and proceeded to have a slight panic attack. She could be heard to plead on the tape, and said something that shocked me.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Corvine on the tape. “You are to keep the blindfold on until the end of the experiments, Janie. Are you listening to me? Put it back on at once.”

  The girl replied, and I could hear her voice wavering as she fought back tears. “Uncle, please, don't make me wear it. I'm scared. I don't want to be here in the dark anymore. Please start a fire... I don't want to sit in the dark...”

  That was something I hadn't expected.

  The first subject in these experiments, the girl called Janie, was Corvine's own niece.

  He shouted at her on tape, ordered her to put the blindfold back on, and for the remainder of that session her sobs could be heard in the background.

  I'd long held contempt for Corvine and his sick experiments, but learning that he'd subjected a member of his own family to such terrible things really put a new face on the matter. He'd been more savage and terrible a man than I'd given him credit for. Hearing the girl cry on the recording was extremely uncomfortable—her fear was real. Hers were the sobs of one fallen into despair—one suffering from a paralyzing terror.

  I realized I'd heard that same crying before, during a mysterious phone call at Dave Thackeray's radio studio.

  I'd heard it from Enid Lancaster.

  The rest of the tape was concerned with Corvine's developing theories. The experiments continued despite Janie's intense dislike of the dark, and
he upped the dosage—necessitating the usage of restraints. In one particularly chilling passage, the doctor noted, “The subject's level of agitation tends to increase depending on the dosage of the drug, and it approaches worrisome heights. If not for the restraints I'm certain she'd attempt self-harm if only to put a stop to the terror.”

  As the sessions went by, Corvine began to refer to his niece not by her name, but as “the subject” with increasing frequency—something that I found strange and distressing. He was becoming disconnected from the experiments, from the real world, and seemingly had no qualms about treating the girl as a lab rat. During several points, Janie's vital signs were reported to reach unsafe levels—she'd experienced lapses in consciousness and borderline hypertensive crises during a few sessions.

  But eventually, during one evening when he'd fed her the drugs, restrained her and blocked out her senses, he got his desired breakthrough.

  “Can you hear them?” asked Janie.

  I placed the tape recorder on the desk and stood up, pacing nervously about the room. I shoved my hands into my pockets but they shook all the same.

  I pictured a young woman tied to the chair I'd just been sitting in, with a blindfold and a pair of large headphones on, asking me the same question I'd heard that dead kid on Main Street ask me with his dying breath.

  “Who?” asked Corvine on the tape, not a little excitedly. “Who do you hear?”

  “The voices. I can hear the voices...” The girl could be heard to squirm, to whimper. “So many voices...”

  “Do you hear aunt Geneva? Do you hear cousin Lacey?” demanded Corvine. “Reach out to them! Call out to the two of them!”

  I wasn't even sure that the girl could hear Corvine, considering the headphones she was supposed to be wearing at the time, but she seemed to respond to him in the negative. “They're not here,” she said, her voice rising in a tremulous whisper. “B-But... there's someone else who wants to talk.”

  The tape ended there, plunging the cabin once again into a profound silence.

  It was just as well. Suddenly, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. I returned to the chair, leaning back against it and rifling through the box of tapes in search of the next one in the sequence. I pulled the second tape from its case, fumbled with it as I pushed it into the player, and then rewound its first side.

  By the time I was ready to hit PLAY however, I was nodding off.

  My fatigue had been mounting for awhile, and it was clear that I couldn't put off sleep any longer. Setting aside the tape recorder, I cradled my head in my hands and yawned. I'd return to the car, make sure the doors were locked, and pass out in the front seat till morning. The tapes would keep till then.

  I stood, leaving the tape recorder on the desk and limped out of the cabin. The flashlight's glow hurt my eyes as I had a look around the grounds. Leaves shook in the wind, and a large insect whizzed by, but otherwise things were still. Adjusting the driver's seat, I dropped into the Cavalier, locked all of the doors and stretched out.

  I would've fallen asleep right then if not for what greeted me outside my window.

  In the corner of my eye, something in the direction of the cabin's moonlit roof caught my attention.

  A figure stood upon the weathered shingles, its black mane whipping past a disordered face in a gust of wind. Wide, empty sockets like holes punched into drywall watched me from the rooftop as the thing stood sentry.

  And then, as if it had been carried off on the breeze, the figure was gone. The black walls of the forest gave no clue as to its whereabouts. Each tree gouged at the sky like a spear, and from between their knotted trunks came the susurrations of wandering night fauna, of chatty bugs. I put on my headlights for a spell and caught the furry flank of a black bear as it lumbered past the site.

  There's nothing out here. You're tired, paranoid. Get some sleep. This place won't seem so strange in the morning.

  I did fall asleep, eventually.

  But not before I made sure to keep my knife in the cup-holder beside me.

  13

  I heard Corvine's voice in my dreams. That was the only concrete thing I could remember upon waking in the driver's seat the next morning, my lower back awfully sore and my neck stiff. The bulk of the imagery in my dreams—recollections of the asylum, visions of things standing on top of the cabin, or on the hood of my car—was less clear to me. When I was sure that there was nothing waiting for me outside, I kicked open the driver's side door and hobbled out, cursing under my breath.

  The air was cool. A bright band of sunlight shone overhead, but even by day the surrounding trees did a fine job of fostering darkness. The cabin remained bathed in shadow. This was my first time getting a feel for the woods by the light of day, and I admit to feeling a twinge of despair as I marveled at their density. Even during daylight hours the forest here looked damn near impenetrable. When I'd done all I'd set out to do here and the time came for me to leave, how the hell was I going to find my way out?

  I looked down at my phone, waved it in the air for a while in search of a signal.

  Let me tell you, whenever I eventually got out of these woods, the phone wasn't going to play a role in it. I was going to end up driving blind until I stumbled upon a proper road.

  I took a leak outside the cabin and lit up a cigarette. Breakfast was a lukewarm canned coffee drink and another granola bar. The prepackaged food was getting damn old; I'd have killed a man for a McMuffin just then.

  While finishing up my morning routine, I found myself sticking mainly to that band of sunlight and allowing its warmth to seep into my skin, where it served to banish the chill the long, dark night had cursed me with. Sitting on the hood of the car, I wiped the sleep gunk from my eyes and thought back to everything I'd listened to the night before.

  Corvine, big softy that he was, had wished to make contact with his dead wife and daughter. Trouble was, he wasn't the kind to roll up to his local Toys-R-Us for a ten dollar Ouija board. He had to go overboard, do things the hard way. And so he'd enlisted his niece to help him bridge the gap between the worlds of the living and the dead. It'd all been innocent enough; that is, until he started tying her to chairs and force-feeding her untested designer drugs out of Europe that would mess with her brain chemistry.

  And here I'd always held a grudge against one of my uncles for buying me the wrong Bengals jersey one Christmas.

  The fate of Corvine's niece, Janie, was uncertain. Of course, when you considered what'd happened to Enid Lancaster, it was easy to make some guesses. Someone subjected to such barbarous experiments as these wouldn't likely be able to return to a normal life, and I doubted also that Corvine would have wanted her running around, blabbing about all she'd been put through. There'd been mentions, previously, of the first subject not responding well to treatment. For all I knew, she was somewhere out here, buried in this endless sea of green. Any clues as to Janie's whereabouts would have to come from the doctor's notes.

  The coffee drink gave me a welcome caffeine buzz, but the stuff near the bottom had a sour taste to it that I could hardly stomach. I swished it around before shotgunning the remainder with a wince and then threw the empty into the trunk of my car. From a bag in the back I pulled out a bottle of water and a clean washcloth, which I used to give my stubbled face a quick scrub. It made me feel human again. Looking myself over in the back window of the car, I combed back my hair and turned to the cabin.

  There were a few tapes left to listen to, a lot of books and papers to sift through. I considered packing it all into my trunk and taking it with me. That was probably the smart thing to do; sticking around, especially at night, wasn't good for my mental state. I decided I'd listen to a few more tapes right now that it was early and the light was good, and that in the afternoon I'd pack up the remainder and get moving.

  I'd just approached the door to the cabin, was about to step inside, when suddenly I paused. From the other side of the door, in that single, small room I knew to be empty, I hear
d a voice.

  Corvine's voice.

  Easing the door open all the way, I stood at the threshold and had a look inside, finding nothing out of sorts. Nothing, that is, except for the tape recorder I'd left on the desk. The little red light in the corner was on and from where I stood I could see the cogs in the tape turning.

  The damn thing was on.

  “You must try to relax,” urged Corvine.

  Sobs, gasps, cut through the recording. “It's here... it's inside...”

  For an instant, I thought Janie was speaking to me. I had another glance around the cabin, her stifled crying filling the air, and was enveloped in a pall of dread. The daylight issuing from the window made no difference; the feel of being watched, all too familiar to me since entering these woods, returned with gusto. I shuddered, easing the door shut behind me.

  “There's no one else in the room that I can see,” said the doctor. He'd meant to console the girl, but the rough edge of annoyance in his voice made the statement anything but conciliatory. “Focus, Janie. Focus. This presence... where is it?”

  Fighting back what sounded like a groan, the girl could be heard to lean back in the chair; its legs scraped the floor and the resultant noise was captured in the recording. “It's here... it's right in front of me... I can... I can almost see it.”

  “What does it look like?” asked Corvine expectantly.

  “Eyes... big eyes.” The girl paused to gulp in a lungful of air. “No... no... it has no eyes. They're just... just holes looking out at me from somewhere...”

  The remainder of that session was cut short due to Janie's screams. She went ballistic, and I heard what I imagined was the chair falling to the floor and her falling with it. Corvine tried to set things right, to calm her down, but she was deliriously frightened.

  I stared down at the tape recorder in nauseous awe. The little box quivered as it relayed to me these screams of more than thirty years ago. Janie's anguish had been perfectly preserved in this grotesque record. I was going to switch it off, too unsettled to listen further, when the session ended abruptly and Corvine's next dictation began.