“Elizabeth never talked much about the fact she'd been adopted, and neither did her parents. Until she told me, shortly before we went driving around in search of her birth parents, I'd had no idea. She always kind of kept that fact to herself, didn't want to make much of it. She just started getting a curious itch at some point, though. Back then, I remember her saying that she wanted to meet her birth parents because she wanted to ask them how it was possible that two people could harm their child the way she'd been harmed. She had a lot of issues because of that abuse, but by the time I met her you couldn't tell. She did a real good job of hiding it. She'd make up stories sometimes, like I said, but beneath all the bullshit it was clear she was just trying to hide the pain from her past.
“Anyway, I didn't mention her history because I didn't think it had anything to do with this shit. It wasn't any of your business, professor—all of that was in the past. So what if Elizabeth is adopted? We've got bigger fish to fry. Need I remind you that she's got this Occupant thing inside of her right now? That she's like something out of a horror movie?”
I came to a four-way stop, pausing at the intersection just long enough to make sure there was no one else around, and then gunned it. “See, here's the problem with that. Her birth mother, whoever the hell she was, had the last name 'Lancaster'. Sound familiar?”
He scoffed. “Big whoop. It's a coincidence. Nothing more.” He fell silent for a moment, doing some counting on his fingers. “Anyway, that girl, Enid, died in 1989 at the asylum. Elizabeth is way too young to have been Enid's daughter. So, if that's what you're thinking—”
“Don't put words in my mouth,” I said. “But it's a hell of a coincidence. And let me tell you something, I've learned to hate coincidences recently. They never end well, not these days.” For some minutes we rode on silence. I found a sign pointing back towards civilization and, when I'd wiped at my tired eyes and re-centered my focus on the road, I pointed the car back towards Moorlake. “The phone call. Who was it?”
Jake clammed up. He began to fidget, scratched at his ear as though merely putting the phone up to it back at the house had allowed something to slither into him. “It wasn't her,” he said with not a little difficulty.
“No shit,” I replied. “But who was it?”
“It was an imitator,” was all he could say. “It was something trying to sound like her, but there was just... something off about it.”
“Sure,” I said, steeling myself against a shudder as I recalled the voice on the Hiawatha Tapes. The voice of the Occupant. “And what did it say?”
Another pause. “It said: 'The better to see you with'. I wasn't sure what that meant, but it freaked me out, bad.”
I knew what it meant, and at the reference I nearly swerved off the road. In one of the Hiawatha tapes, the Occupant had messed with Dr. Corvine. When the doctor had attempted to test the thing's powers, it'd stunned him—and me—by responding to the message he'd been thinking of putting down on a sheet of paper.
“What'd that mean?” asked Jake. “Why'd it say that?”
I had my guesses. The Occupant was probably toying with us—toying with me. “It's from one of the tapes,” I replied. “Never mind that. The question is, where do we go from here? Elizabeth could be anywhere. We need to find her before this gets out of hand, before anyone else is drawn into it.”
“Her parents... Do you think they're safe?” asked Jake, looking through the rear window.
“I don't know,” I replied. “I guess that no one's really safe until we manage to send that thing back to where it came from.”
“How do we send it back?” Jake bit his lip. “Can we send it back?”
I ignored the questions and instead focused on what we did know. “Elizabeth is descended from someone with the name Lancaster. And now, possessed by the Occupant, she's gone missing. Where she's gone is anyone's guess, but we do have this one lead—a town called Milsbourne and the surname Lancaster. I think that's where we need to go. Its a stretch, but it's possible that Elizabeth has gone back there.” Even if the girl hadn't gone back to the town of Milsbourne—a place that, for all I knew, didn't even exist—this was still the closest thing to a plan that we had at our disposal. If there was any connection between Elizabeth and the Lancaster line that'd birthed Enid, then venturing to this mysterious locale might give us more information.
Either that, or it would waste a massive amount of time that we could otherwise use in seeking out our possessed target closer to home.
There was really no telling.
“What would Elizabeth hope to find in such a place?” Jake looked out his window, arms crossed. “Based on what little she could remember, it's some small, rundown place. Probably empty.”
“I don't know, but it's worth a closer look. We're going to head back to Moorlake and see what we can dig up. Sound good?”
Jake was so fatigued he looked a good five to ten years older than his norm. I only caught glimpses of myself in the rearview now and then, but it was pretty clear I was running on fumes. A nap—even a short one—was necessary if we were going to stay on the path. Shifting into the fast lane, I made a suggestion. “You can crash at my place. It'll be safer if we stick together. We'll sleep a bit so that we don't lose our minds and then get moving on this first thing in the morning.”
He smirked. “How do you know that we haven't lost our minds already?”
I didn't answer him because, in reality, I didn't know. Instead, I just kept on driving.
22
It was damn late by the time we got back to the apartment. I didn't think to check the time—the best I could do was to kick off my shoes at the front door, crack open a cold bottle of water and shuffle into my bed. I offered Jake the recliner in the living room, and he was asleep with the leg rest up before I could even say “goodnight”.
The sleep I had after that marathon session in the car and all of its attendant stresses and terrors was the absolute best in recent memory, but for a single complaint.
In those spaces where sleep grew thin—when I tossed and turned, when I transitioned from one phase of sleep to the next—I felt someone watching me. It wasn't a subtle sensation at all; rather, I felt absolutely convinced that, had I only opened my eyes, I'd have seen something standing there, watching me from the corner of the room.
And I knew damn well what it was I'd find lurking there.
I knew better than that, of course, and my body was too tired to put up with such guff. So, instead, I managed a decent sleep and awoke in the mid-morning, my bladder teeming for all of the coffee I'd sucked down the night previous. I shuffled out of bed to relieve myself and found Jake still snoring in the recliner, mouth wide open. I let him sleep while throwing together some coffee, and it wasn't until I was into my second mug of the stuff that Jake came ambling to my room, groggy.
By then, I'd already started into the day's work.
Internet searches for “Milsbourne, Michigan,” both in and out of quotes, brought up zero hits.
I'd smashed headfirst into another dead end. “Looks like Mrs. Morrissey may have been correct. 'Milsbourne' may have been a typo. When I look for it online, nothing comes up.”
Jake grumbled, rubbed at his eyes. “Maybe it's an old place—a ghost town or something.”
“A ghost town?” I massaged my jaw, working out some built-up tension. “It's possible, I guess. Maybe it's listed on an old map, somewhere. But I'm surprised some history buff hasn't discussed the place online if that's the case.” I stood, downing the rest of my morning joe, and paced into the kitchen to rinse out my mug. There was one other place I could go to research the name of this locale—the very same that had brought to light more details about Corvine. “Feel like taking a trip to the campus library, by chance?”
“Not really,” replied Jake. “But I'll come along if we can get some food first. I haven't eaten in like two days.” The groaning of his stomach made me believe him.
I treated him to a breakfast at the
Corner Grill that I couldn't really afford and then we walked to the university library.
Once again, the library was almost completely empty. This time, though—and I'm not sure if it was because we just so happened to pop in while everyone was on lunch—it seemed even emptier to me, for only a single librarian sat at the front desk to greet us as we entered. All the rest of the staff that'd been there the last time—the other librarians, the bored student workers—were nowhere to be seen.
Jake didn't strike me as the kind of guy who was comfortable in libraries to begin with, and this desolate aesthetic did nothing to warm his attitude towards the place. “Where the hell is everyone? Are you sure the place is open?” he asked.
I nodded, leading him up to the same, dim computer lab on the second floor I'd used during my last visit. Selecting a computer in the back row, I paused half-way into the room to ease open the blinds and let a little sunlight in. “We won't be long. I'm going to have a look in the university database for mentions of 'Milsbourne'. I'll look for 'Lancaster', too. Maybe we'll find something, maybe we won't. You can wander a little, if you want.”
He rolled his eyes. “Gee, I'd love to, but I wouldn't know where to start.”
I logged into the computer and cracked my knuckles loudly. “Ah, right. I forgot you're the kind of lunk who never picks up a book for leisure. You don't know what you're missing, bub. A good book can take you places you never knew existed.”
“I'd rather wait for the movie,” was his rejoinder. Sitting at the next computer station over, he tapped in his own information and logged on, opening a browser window and then signing on to social media.
The browser loaded and I opened two different tabs. In one I ran a search for the surname “Lancaster” in the university database; in the second, this enigmatic locality, “Milsbourne”. The former brought a handful of hits, which initially excited me, though as I combed through them I soon discovered they had nothing to do with the situation at hand. A university student in the 90's with that last name had been awarded a football scholarship; a professor by the name of Therese Lancaster had published a book about seashells. The other results were similarly useless.
I closed out of that tab and focused instead on the single result that'd trickled in for “Milsbourne”. It was from a book housed in the library, a guide to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan's abandoned mining towns. Perhaps Jake had been on the money. Milsbourne was probably a ghost town these days if it was being mentioned in a book like this one.
“OK, so the place exists. Or, rather, it might have existed at one time.” I glanced at Jake's screen. He was on Facebook, scrolling through photos of himself and Elizabeth. I cleared my throat and he quickly closed out of it. “There's a result on here pointing to an old book on the mining settlements of Michigan, and if we can check it out then I'll bet we can find the place.”
“Sure,” began Jake, “but what then? What if we go and there's nothing waiting for us? What if Elizabeth isn't there at all?”
It was a very real possibility. “We haven't got a choice,” I said. “Elizabeth had once wished to revisit her birthplace, to reconnect with her biological parents. Now that she's gone, it stands to reason that she might have gone looking for this Milsbourne place.”
“Except that we're not looking for Elizabeth, exactly,” Jake was quick to add. “We're looking for the thing that hitched a ride in her. What could that thing possibly want in an abandoned mining town?”
I sighed, pushing away from my desk and taking down the reference number of the historical text. “Jesus, just let me look into this, OK? It's the best lead we've got. Do you have any better ideas? Want to drive around Moorlake again, maybe stop by Kinko's and make a bunch of missing person fliers?”
Jake stood, scratching at his chin. “Uh... what's Kinko's?”
I decided to ignore that question—along with the gutting realization of my own age—and marched out of the computer lab. Referencing the chicken scratch on the back of my hand, I singled out the historical texts on the State of Michigan, located down a dusty stretch near the back wall of the HISTORIES section. Lighting was poor, making it difficult to read the faded print on the spines. After a few minutes of crawling on my hands and knees to scan the book titles from up-close, I enlisted Jake's help.
Neither of us could find it.
“Maybe they lost it?” offered Jake.
“Well then they'd better find it again,” I replied. “Of all the books in this goddamn library to be out of place, this one has to be missing?” Jogging back down to the ground floor, I made haste through the shelves of new releases and approached the sleepy librarian sitting up front with a forced smile. “I'm very sorry to bother you, but I was hoping you could help me find a book. You see, I've got the reference number here, but my friend and I have had a good look at the stacks and haven't found it. Can you tell us whether it's been checked out, or...?”
The librarian, who wore a gaudy necklace made of brightly-colored plastic beads, was all too happy to help. Punching the number into the catalog, she scrolled and scrolled, discussing the weather, asking us what it was that brought us to the library on such a fine day, how she couldn't wait for classes to resume because the leisurely pace afforded by these truncated vacation hours was getting to her.
Jake and I gave perfunctory answers, made shit up, but mostly we were waiting for her to tell us where we could find this old book.
Having reached the end of her scrolling, she frowned. Then, adjusting her glasses, she turned around and disappeared into a room to her back. “Just one second!” She returned something like five minutes later, during which time I'd cracked the cover of a new Stephen King book and skimmed the first chapter. She came back with a small wooden box in her hands—a box, I soon learned, which was packed tightly with strips of weathered card stock. “I'm very sorry about this, but if you can bear with me, I'll see if I can't track down the book. A few years ago, when we went to a strictly digital system, some books got lost or miscategorized in the process. We've got over seven million books in our collection, and some probably haven't been touched in many years. It's not uncommon for things to get misplaced or for our system to lose track of them.” She began flipping through cards, stopping now and then to check the reference number she'd jotted down, and then eventually happened upon the card she was looking for. “Ah, here it is.”
“You found it?” I asked.
She gave a slight laugh, shaking her head. “I've found the card that corresponded to it, but unfortunately it seems this book is missing. It was checked out in the late 70's and it's been marked here that it was never returned. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I'll have to update our system. I'm sorry for the inconvenience!” She turned the card over and showed it to me, as if she wanted to make sure that I believed her.
“May I have a look?” I asked. She handed me the card stock slip without hesitation and I took to reading its contents. The book had been acquired in 1959 and had been checked out something like ten times by different people. Their last names were still penciled in on the slip's faded surface. At the bottom, in red pen, was a note—which I presumed had been written by a librarian—that read, “MISSING, NOT RETURNED.”
But what really got me going was the name of the last person who'd checked it out.
The last of the ten names, corresponding to a check-out of the book in December of 1979, was one W. R. Corvine. The signature was clear and unmistakable. I almost crunched the slip in my hand and both Jake and the librarian gave me a weird look.
“Is everything all right?” she asked, tucking the slip back into the wooden box.
“Thank you for your help,” I said, forgetting to smile. I then nudged Jake and gunned it through the lobby, throwing open the big, metal doors. Once outside, I dug around in my pockets for my cigarettes and lighter and perched atop a concrete half-wall near the building's entrance to smoke.
“What's the matter with you?” asked Jake, crinkling his nose as I
took a puff.
I leaned forward, grimacing. “Guess who else had an interest in that book? Take one guess.”
He shrugged.
“Corvine. Back in '79, some time after he'd finished working with his niece in Hiawatha, the doctor had suddenly taken an interest in Bumfuck, Michigan. Now, why do you suppose that is? Think it's just a coincidence that the doctor who's responsible for all of this decided to lift an obscure book—the only book—in the library's extensive collection that dealt with a little place called Milsbourne? A place, it just so happens, that your possessed girlfriend happened to be born in?” I puffed away like it was my job, smoking the Viceroy down to the filter and hurriedly lighting another. “It's no goddamn coincidence, I tell you. This is all linked. We're still being led. God knows what towards, but we're being led!”
My heart was thrashing in my chest. I felt like a dog trying to break its leash, like I was about to come unhinged. Once, not so long ago, I'd laughed conceitedly at Dave Thackeray, the radio DJ, for his belief in a number of bizarre conspiracy theories. But I wasn't laughing anymore. At this point, despite all my learning, despite my usual gravitation towards the perennially rational, I was coming undone at the seams. Once again, I was caught up in some mysterious flow; the threads of my own pitiful life had become intertwined with those of a thirty-year-old plot. Monsters were real, and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to get away from them. Even this lead, which had seemed such a long-shot, so hopeless at first, linked back to the nightmare I'd first glimpsed at Chaythe Asylum. How could this be? How far did this terrible web span?
Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2) Page 12