Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2)

by Ambrose Ibsen

  But the woman didn't laugh. Her eyes widened, almost as if she believed me, and she took a step back. “What do you mean, you experienced his research?”

  “That's a long story. I'll tell you everything, but first, I want to call the cops. I've been reviewing some of the doctor's notes and dictations, and I think he may have murdered someone. He brought his niece with him to this cabin in the 70's and ran experiments on her. I think he may have killed and buried her out here.” I looked up at the woman pleadingly. “You really think I'd make the drive to this shit-hole if I didn't have a good reason?”

  To my surprise, the woman lowered her gun. Combing a hand through her hair, she shook her head. “You have been doing your homework, I can see that. But you've got one thing backwards. W. R. Corvine ain't been among the living in quite some time.” She nodded to the edge of the woods. “Because I put him in the ground.”

  I froze. “Excuse me?”

  She stepped aside and urged me onto my feet. “I'm that niece of his.”

  Unable to believe my ears, I held onto the Cavalier as I gained my feet and asked, “You're Janie?”

  “Jane,” she was quick to correct. “Only he ever called me Janie.” She motioned to the cabin with the shotgun. “Come on. Let's walk.” She led me towards the crumbling abode, carefully watching my every movement. By the time we stepped inside, she seemed to lower her guard a little. She invited me to sit in the chair, glancing around the cabin with the sourest expression she'd yet donned, and then stood at the door with the shotgun at her side. “I haven't actually been inside this damned place for ages.” She pointed to the desk, chuckling at its utter disarray. “You've been busy, eh?”

  I had a seat, brushing fresh dirt off my pant legs. “Can I ask you a question?”

  She didn't protest, so I went ahead.

  “How did you know I was here? Do you live nearby, or...”

  She hiked a thumb out towards the window. “I got trail cameras set up all throughout this area. Some just outside this very cabin. I like to know who comes and goes—you never can tell who's going to end up paying this place a visit.”

  I just knew there were going to be some high-def pictures of me taking a shit in the woods saved onto one of those trail cameras, but I ignored that fact and pressed on. “Why the need for cameras? Do a lot of people come poking around?”

  “No,” she shot back. “None except for you in all these years. But you can't be too careful. The weather was good today and I thought I'd check the cameras. Lo and behold, I find you here.” She cleared her throat and paced before me like a caged lion. Her boots were a muddied black, laced up past her shins, and the camo outfit she wore looked a little threadbare in places. Her cheeks were red, forehead damp with sweat. “I'm going to ask the questions from here on out, and you're gonna answer them. Got it?”

  I nodded. What choice did I have?

  “How did you find out about all of this? About what happened here, my uncle's experiments?”

  “You just want a quick rundown, or...?”

  “The whole goddamn enchilada,” she uttered.

  I started from the top. I mentioned how some students of mine had come up with an idea for a ghost-hunting club, and that—after getting a lead from a radio DJ who'd been getting weird calls at night—we chose Chaythe Asylum as our first meeting place. “We went there for a tour—the three of us and the groundskeeper, and—”

  She stopped me right there, her gaze becoming steely. She panned around the cabin slowly, a finger pressed to her lips, and then her eyes slowly returned to me, her red cheeks sunken in a frown. “Have you seen it?” she asked.

  It didn't take much guessing to know what she meant by “it” in this case. I nodded. “The Occupant? Yeah.”

  Jane flew into a rage, stamping her feet against the sagging floors. She moved like she was going to clock me in the head with the butt of her shotgun, but stopped short, uttering a string of curses. “Why did you come here, then? Why did you come?”

  The truth was that curiosity, along with a lingering fear that something needed put right, had drawn me to the cabin. “I found out about this cabin, about Corvine's work in Hiawatha, from some of his notes. We had a hell of a time at that asylum, and I wanted to make sure it was over. I wanted to be certain that that thing was really gone. The only place in the world I could come for answers was here, and I didn't know what I'd find. Turns out there's still a lot of material in this place—some of which may answer my questions.”

  She grit her teeth. “There's a lot of stuff here, all right. Could never bring myself to destroy it; always hoped that there was a key to stop the madness tucked in there somewhere, in a book or cassette tape. But I don't think there is. What my uncle set loose ain't gonna be put back by some writing in a book.”

  “Maybe you're right,” I conceded. “But there's nowhere else in the world I can turn. No one knows about this stuff, about what your uncle did. When me and my students wandered into that asylum we really didn't know what we were getting into. And then, when we encountered that thing in the dark... it hounded us, followed us out. I had to know for sure that it wasn't going to continue following us, or that—”

  “It what?” She struck the wall with her fist, and for a second I thought the whole groaning edifice was going to come down. “What'd you say? The thing left the building?”

  “Uhh... yeah,” I replied with a shrug. “We got trapped deep inside the asylum. It followed us through every passage and didn't let up until we showed it the way out.” I then added, as if it would somehow help my case, “But after it stepped outside, it vanished. It disappeared like a fog.”

  The business end of Jane's shotgun found its way to my breast, and her trigger finger barely avoided a full-on squeeze. “Did you bring it here? Hm? Are you following its commands? In contact with it?” She reared back, striking me in the chin with the back of the gun, before gluing the barrel to my heart again. “Answer me! Did you bring it here?”

  Dazed, I licked at my bloodied lip, the skin broken and pulsing, and shook my head. “I don't know what you're talking about. I came here because I wanted to make sure it was gone, not to work alongside it. That's what your uncle did. He tried to make a deal with it, right? Because he wanted to see his wife and daughter again.”

  She studied me contemplatively for a long time—more than a minute of silence passed between the two of us—before stepping back. “How did it reach out to you? A phone call?”

  “That's right. It's kind of hard to explain. I'd put out an ad for leads in the local paper. I wanted to find a good spot for me and my students to tour where they could do their ghost-hunting thing. Next night I hear from a local DJ who claims to have been getting calls every night from a number once tied to the asylum. He invites me to come listen to it, and it's creepy. I heard your uncle on the line, and the voice of Enid Lancaster, too, I think. It was like a recording. Turns out that's the last of the calls that came in—after I heard it and made plans to visit the asylum, the calls stopped coming, according to the DJ.”

  Jane kneaded her brow. “Yes, because you were lured. It was mimicry.” She gave me an awful look just then, a mixture of “I'm so sorry” and “I wish you were dead.” Leaning against the door, she sighed. “You should not have answered its call.”

  “No doubt.” I cracked my knuckles and leaned back in the chair, studying the ceiling. “I wish I hadn't. I don't know how it is that the Occupant managed to reach out to begin with—and why it chose me, of all people, to contact.”

  Again, Jane looked me over narrowly. She sniffed the air as though my scent might hold the answer and then said, “Well, you had to have made yourself known to it, somehow. Touched by death.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?” I asked. “I only put an ad in the newspaper—I didn't know a thing about any of this, about what had gone on here or at the asylum, until very recently. This isn't the kind of thing I'd ever knowingly invite into my life, all right?”

  She s
hook her head. “Of course not. But we don't get to decide—it's out of our hands. You were touched by death, and that's how it came to take an interest in you. Tell me, what happened?”'

  It took me a few moments to reply. There was only one incident in recent memory that sufficiently qualified as being “touched by death”, and that'd been the death of that student on Main Street. “I'd been on my way to class a few days before the start of the break and saw a kid get hit by a truck. He died in my arms. Later that week, all of this ghost-hunting stuff started...” I laughed weakly. “It was messed up, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. It's not like that kid was one of Corvine's subjects. He had nothing to do with that.”

  Jane slumped to the ground, arms crossed. “It has everything to do with that.” I thought I saw her trembling, and for a moment her voice and the voice of the scared girl I'd heard on the tapes overlapped. This woman, sitting on the floor of the cabin, had become the frightened Janie once again. “You did bring it back here,” she blurted. “After all these years, you led it back to this spot.”

  I didn't know how to respond. “No... listen, I came alone. I...”

  She jabbed a finger in my direction. “We aren't alone here. It can see me through you. It's watching, listening now.” She glanced around the room. “I can feel it.”

  Though I knew it to be impossible, I did feel another presence in the room with us just then. Around some corner, in some dark space, was that monstrous thing. The hanger-on that had popped up in my periphery throughout the night, the one I'd felt watching me at all hours.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What is the Occupant?”

  Jane licked her lips, repeating, “You should not have answered its call.”

  16

  “Is it a ghost?” I asked. “Some spirit from the other side that wants a second shot at life? Or is it something else—a demon that preys on innocent people? So far, in all the things I've read and the tapes I've listened to, your uncle never made it clear just what this 'Occupant' really is.”

  Jane held out her hand, spread it wide, and traced a small shape across her open palm. “Imagine, if you will, that the world of the dead is a kind of web. Each strand of that web is made up of an individual soul, OK? And nothing happens to any one of those strands without all of the others being affected. A small ripple, a minor disruption, is going to be felt throughout. When one among the dead experiences something, all of the others do, too.” She closed her hand tightly, her knuckles going white. “But that's not what the Occupant is. As best I can describe it, it stands apart from the web. It's the fat spider sitting in the middle of it, and it's always paying attention to what happens across that web. Nothing goes on in the world of the dead that the Occupant doesn't know about.”

  I nodded, not sure that I fully understood. “So, it's the devil?”

  “I didn't say that.” She frowned. “There isn't a good word for what it is. It doesn't fit into any existing box very neatly. I wish it were just some guy with a pitchfork and red horns, but...” She trailed off.

  “How do you know this? Where did you learn about this... this 'web'?” I asked.

  Wide-eyed, she replied, “Oh, the Occupant showed me. It shows you all kinds of things when it borrows your head.” She tapped at her forehead with a single fingertip, a nervous laugh dribbling from her lips. “Such awful goddamn things.”

  “All right, so let's suppose that's all true. How did the Occupant hone in on me, in particular? Last I checked, I'm not dead.”

  As if she'd expected this question, Jane nodded slowly. “You said this kid died in your arms, right? You—your face—was probably the last thing he saw in this life. When he became a part of the web, the Occupant took notice. And from behind those dead eyes it must have been looking out at you.”

  What she was describing was cosmically horrific. So much so that I didn't want to believe it. But after all I'd been through since starting down this path, I was in no position to argue with her. She'd been through the experiments, was the only living person—to my knowledge—who'd ever made a connection with the Occupant like Enid Lancaster had done. I turned my attention to other matters, asking, “So, what happened, then? With your uncle, I mean. I understand he carried out experiments at Chaythe Asylum and caused a patient there, Enid Lancaster, to go on a killing spree. What happened after that? He fell off the radar.”

  “My uncle came back here in 1989. Brought some of his research back with him. Finally, after what'd happened to that girl at the asylum, he'd changed his tune. Realized that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to chat with monsters from beyond our world—that what he'd been doing all these years had been the devil's work. You see, after he'd wrapped experiments with me in the 70's, he'd thrown me into a sanitarium a few hours north of here. Real quiet, out of the way. A place where he had some connections, and where headcases could be easily forgotten, kept out of view. I didn't tell a soul in all those years about what I'd been through for fear that it would return—that my discussing it would somehow bring it back. It's always listening, you know. And once it's touched you, once it's taken you into its sights, you're marked.

  “But in '89, after what happened at the asylum, my uncle came back to Michigan and bailed me out of the sanitarium. He said we needed to work together again, that he needed to find out what it was he'd done, and to somehow reverse it. And for that, he was going to need my help. There would be more experiments, more drugs, more horrific visits in the night by that thing...

  “I couldn't do it. I'd spent years sleeping with the lights on after what he'd put me through—I still do to this day—and I wasn't going to stand for it. I told him as much and it caused a big fight. One night, here at the cabin, he tried to force me into the chair. He'd ordered a new drug, something that he hoped could lure the Occupant back, but I wouldn't take it. When push came to shove, I shoved harder. Took him by surprise. I stabbed him in the side with a knife, and while he hobbled around, surprised at the wound, I took up the shotgun he kept around for warding off bears and wolves. You can imagine the rest. He's buried almost a mile from here, in a stretch of woods that probably hadn't been tread since the time of the Indians. I buried him real deep, too. Took me more than a day to dig a hole deep enough to keep the wildlife from getting at him. Never told a soul, of course. And I expect you won't, either.” She looked to the gun on the floor, and then to me, brows arched.

  “Sure,” I replied. “Your secret's safe with me. But... if you don't mind me asking, why did you take part in his experiments to begin with? And what had he hoped to accomplish?”

  Jane folded her hands and rested them atop her knees. “My parents had died a year or two before all of that started, and my uncle had become my legal guardian. Believe it or not, he'd been a good man up to that point. Had treated me like his very own daughter. Of course, when my aunt Geneva and cousin Lacey died, things changed. Brilliant though the man was, he wasn't immune to grief, and it changed him. Left him twisted. He wanted answers, and for a few years there he turned his back on medicine and started on pilgrimages in search of the unknown. Read a lot of rare books, familiarized himself with all sorts of occult traditions. He even did some ghost-hunting himself, visiting haunted locations and attempting to get proof of the afterlife. It was never enough, though. He'd make a little progress, and then he'd immediately up the ante.

  “Because what he really wanted was to see his wife and daughter again. At first, he just wanted to hear their voices. To know that they still existed out there in some form. But eventually he got in too deep, and playing with tape recorders wasn't good enough. And somewhere along the line, he threw all caution to the wind. The drugs, the sensory experiments... he went off the deep end, and managed to do something that one would have thought impossible. He managed to bridge the gap between two worlds using one person's brain as the common link.

  “But, as you know, it wasn't his wife and daughter that capitalized on that. It was this thing, the Occupant, that slithered
through instead. He did things to my mind, made me receptive to the entity, and then he spoke to it, night after night. And it promised him so many things—things that it couldn't have possibly delivered, but which my desperate uncle latched onto. It claimed that, if brought into the world of the living, it would have the power to resurrect Geneva and Lacey. It just needed to find the right host.

  “I wasn't good enough. I didn't meet its criteria. The connection I had with it, I'm very thankful, was not enough to bring it into the world. It was always too weak. Something was in the way. And so my uncle moved on. He searched and searched, eventually landing a job at that asylum and setting his sights on that Lancaster girl, the one who would lose her mind and go on to commit all those murders. The Occupant, as I understand it, liked her much better. She'd been the ideal host—hand in glove. It took hold of her and tried to escape. My uncle—the only good thing he did in all these years—managed to put her down that night before she could do so. And ever since, the thing has been lost in the halls of that old building, just wandering, I guess. It needs a very specific kind of person to hitch a ride with. It won't just pick anyone.”

  “It needs someone who's been touched by death?” I chanced.

  “More than that. It can use you, work through you, if that's the case. But in order for you to act as a host, you have to have certain characteristics. I never made the cut, but Enid did.” Jane took a pack of Marlboro Reds from the breast pocket of her shirt and lit one up. I wasn't a big fan of Reds, but I bummed one off of her anyhow.

  “What did Enid offer that you didn't?” I asked.

  Jane took a long drag, sending a thin cloud of smoke towards the ceiling on her exhale. “I checked a few boxes. I was an orphan, so I'd been touched by death. My mind had been well-prepped by the drugs... the drugs are what really let it in. But it wouldn't stay, couldn't use me the way it wanted to. Because it needed a body. It needed me to make it a body.”