I said nothing of my intentions, smiling politely and waiting for him to continue.
Prince didn't push any further, something for which I was extremely thankful, and said, “I learned everything I know about shadowed Milsbourne from a man—a scholar—by the name of Jamieson Monroe. Have you heard of him?” He rolled the map up carefully and put it away.
Jake and I had not, and shook our heads.
“Jamieson Monroe was a brilliant man. A scholar whose life's work dealt chiefly with the history of the Midwest and, specifically, its earliest settlements. Even today, some thirty years since his disappearance, his works on the history of the Upper Peninsula and other such areas are considered definitive. Those books are very hard to come by, out of print. They go for enormous sums. On rare occasions when his work is reprinted, it's done by small, niche houses that put out very limited and opulent runs. I've a few of them, but I haven't collected them all.” He took another sip of water and went on. “Milsbourne, Michigan was established in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, owing to a large vein of copper that was discovered to run throughout the hills there. It is—or was, I should say—situated in Michigan within the Hiawatha National Park region, and having been consumed for more than a century by the woods, it sits in what is now an unincorporated area.
“The official censuses of the 1840's, 50's and 60's showed steady growth in the population. At its height, Milsbourne was home to more than five-hundred people. Considering its remoteness, that was quite an impressive total. In the 1870's however, there was a sudden drop-off for which no historians can account. The population plummeted to fewer than two-hundred individuals, and the copper there—much of it left untapped—was abandoned. The reasons for Milsbourne's decline are unknown, though there are theories...
“The more contemporary goings-on at Milsbourne interest me most of all, however. It was some years ago—it must have been in the 1980's, 1983 or '84—when Jamieson Monroe took an active interest in this town called Milsbourne. Next to nothing had been written about the place, a thing which he considered most strange, and to hear him tell it, it seemed almost as though all mentions of the mining town had been stricken from the historical record purposefully. Except for the census data and some few whispers about the town gleaned from secondary sources, he knew next to nothing about it. Seeking to fill out this blank spot in his understanding, Monroe decided to set out there. He took off, backpacking into the region, and was not heard from for weeks. It was feared by those close to him that he had encountered hostility in his probing of the area.
“For, you see, there is a population of people—descendants of the original Milsbourne miners—known to live in that unincorporated area. Think of the Pine Barrens, for instance. They are a population living in a vast, lawless wood, cut-off almost completely from civilization. Though that population has likely dwindled, they have, on occasion, made contact with the outside world. It is theorized that they have gone on due to inbreeding, and that their way of life closely resembles that of the residents around the turn of the last century. It was feared that Monroe had made contact with some of these folk, and that he'd possibly been hurt—or worse.
“But such fears were unfounded, because some weeks after his trip up north, Monroe returned to his post in Columbus. He returned a changed man, however. He'd been shaken by what he'd encountered there, and the book he'd planned to write, summarizing his travels, never materialized. He'd taken notes sufficient to fill three large, leather notebooks, but breathed not a word about their contents except to certain of his trusted colleagues.
“I had the privilege of meeting with him not long after his return. We had been friends, you see, and he had—at one time—been something of a mentor to me. He came to visit one evening, sat in this very room with me. When I'd loosened him up with a few strong drinks, he proved willing to talk. Though, I must add, he was not the man I'd once known. He'd grown jittery, always nervous, and was prone to intense paranoia. Whereas he'd once been a proud and confident academic, he'd met something in those woods that had affected him terribly and set his life on a crash course. He slipped from academia not long after his return, managed to keep himself barely afloat by utilizing the advantages gained from his tenure and former reputation, and lived a very quiet, reclusive live from thereon.
“And then, he vanished...” Prince looked around the room like he'd slipped into another place or time. Perhaps he was seeing Jamieson Monroe sitting across from him. “But, back to that night he came by to visit. Monroe and I were up late into the night, talking, and I admit that I didn't believe half of what the man said. Then again, I'd never known him to exaggerate, to be the superstitious type. Jamieson Monroe was no charlatan—he was, or had been up to that point, as solid an academic as there ever was. But the man who joined me for drinks in the study was a stammering man, a frightened man, who talked about the shadows he'd glimpsed in the dense Michigan woods, and of the thing he had encountered while walking the miles-long route alongside the old copper mine, within a deep cavern.
“He encountered some of the people living there, the descendants of old Milsbourne, and found them to be less backwards than he'd anticipated. Many of them lived close to civilization and even utilized modern technology—owned guns and cars. Some even had electricity. These rough people, though, were very much of the Milsbourne stock, and maintained the traditions and superstitions of their forebears. From them he heard stories—what he at first considered colorful folk tales—about what their ancestors had encountered in the mines. From these, Monroe forged a hypothesis; Milsbourne and its copper-rich mines had been abandoned because citizens in the 1870's had encountered something allegedly malignant within the hills.
“He laughed it off, he told me, but repeated interviews with the locals yielded further mentions of this thing which lurked in the hills and was known to walk the woods at night. And so, perhaps brazenly, he set out looking for it. He walked the trail between the old neighborhoods, long overgrown, and saw cabins that had been left to fester in the wilderness more than a hundred years. He admitted to me that, while camping at night, the sensation of foreign eyes from the hillside, from the dark spaces between the trees, became at times overwhelming. So much so that even he, the hardened academic and skeptic, considered turning back.
“But he made it, after a trek of some days, to a particularly remote area some miles out of Milsbourne's limits, where the mining activity had seemingly been abandoned in a hurry. And it is there, in some deep, shaded cavern, that he glimpsed a thing he refused to describe, but which appeared to be responsible for the fracturing of his mind. He confided that it was the most horrible sight he'd ever laid eyes on, and that his find in that cavern had given credibility to the queer stories of the locals. He ran out of this cavern and into the woods, wandering in a panicked delirium for some days, until he was assisted by a State Highway patrolman many miles from his initial starting point.
“Something, he'd claimed, had come crawling out of the pit after him, or had seemed to. He never saw the thing, but claimed to feel it all about him during the quiet hours. He felt he'd set foot in some kind of desecrated space and that this negative energy was his burden to bear for his arrogance in traipsing around Milsbourne despite the warnings of locals. I laughed, told him he must have eaten some kind of tainted mushroom along the way, but Monroe was not amused. No, he was scared, even then, in the safety and comfort of my study. To him, it soon became apparent, this was all true, and he was locked in a nightmare from which he had not fully awakened despite his return to civilization.
“I wrote Monroe once, some months after his visit. I wanted to know how he was doing, to get his opinion on some of the work I was putting out. I had largely forgotten, by that time, his strange stories and stranger behaviors. I did receive a reply, but it was hardly the one I'd hoped for. He told me, in few words, that he'd been 'called back', and that 'it' had wormed its way into his mind. He felt himself stalked at all hours of the day and could never
hope to return to a normal life.
“He signed the letter, 'Can you hear them, John?' and that was the last I ever heard of Jamieson Monroe. The last anybody ever heard of him, for that matter. He disappeared without a trace in the days after I received that final message.”
I was unable to keep still, and our host seemed to notice my fidgeting. I nodded, tried to play it cool and had taken token glances at the handsome hardcover books that filled his shelves while listening. But, unbeknownst to him, he'd just dropped a bomb on me. Even Jake, who'd been spacing out for much of the talk, had gotten quite serious by the end of it.
This scholar, Jamieson Monroe, had gone to Milsbourne and encountered something profound and malign. The Occupant?
“Is something the matter?” asked Prince.
“No,” I blurted. “No. Please, continue.”
Our host was at the end of his knowledge, however. “That's all there is to tell, really. Monroe's work was never released. I heard rumor that he burned his notes, in fact. Whatever it was he thought he'd encountered there, he wanted to make sure no one else went looking for it. Which raises an interesting question: Why are you so interested? You alluded to a pressing matter earlier...” A curious smile graced his lips, but soon evaporated. “Never mind, I suppose that's none of my concern. And anyway, Monroe would likely warn me against prying into the matter any further.” Collecting our glasses, Prince led us into the kitchen and the showed us the door.
I thanked him many times, and then asked a final question as I started out the door. “Do you think it's possible that Jamieson Monroe is still alive?”
Prince considered this only for a moment, giving a slight shake of the head. “Frankly, no. I imagine the man, God rest his soul, has been gone for many years. Whatever it was he set out to find in those woods, I fear he found it. Or it found him.” He shrugged, waved from the door, and then retreated into the house as we pulled away.
Jake put on his seatbelt and whistled. “Maybe there's something to this mining town after all, huh?”
“There's more than 'something' there,” I replied. “I think the Michigan woods are going to hold the key to all of this. I didn't find it when I first went there, but now that I know what to look for, I think my second trip will be much more fruitful.” I glanced at Jake. “You ready for an eight-hour car ride?”
He didn't say anything. If there was any chance of us finding Elizabeth there—or of finding out more about the entity that now wore her like a hand puppet—then he was on board.
I fueled up, made a run to the store for some snacks—double the amount I'd bought the previous time—and picked up a coffee. “I never thought I'd be going back to these woods,” I said.
He chuckled, staring out the window at the scenery along the highway. “And I never thought I'd be joining you.”
25
There was a lot of time to think while on the road.
I used Jake as a sounding board as I attempted to keep the different strands of this narrative untangled. He listened, chiming in now and then to help keep things straight.
W. R. Corvine, a gifted physician, had lost his wife and daughter in a house fire in 1969. He'd spent some years afterward, stricken with grief, trying to learn more about the paranormal in the hopes of contacting them. In the mid-70's, he'd enlisted his orphaned niece, Jane, to assist him at a cabin in the Hiawatha region of Michigan. Early attempts at communing with the spirits hadn't yielded any fruit. It wasn't until he scrapped his morals and started pumping Jane full of drugs that he saw results.
It was in that cabin that Corvine had first made contact with something—the Occupant. During different sessions with the Occupant, he'd tested it, and when he was sure it was indeed a supernatural presence, he decided to work with it. But its connection to Jane wasn't strong enough. It needed a host body to do all of the things it was promising—something Jane couldn't provide. Abandoning his research with Jane, he threw her into a Michigan sanitarium and fell off the radar for a number of years until he managed to land a post at Chaythe Asylum. There, he began working with a patient by the name of Enid Lancaster, who the Occupant had taken a real liking to.
Enid's connection to the entity was much stronger than Jane's had been, and Corvine felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough—of giving the Occupant what it wanted—when, on the night of March 28th, 1989, Enid escaped from her room, murdered a number of patients and staff during a power outage, and was struck dead before she could escape by Corvine himself. The Third Ward Incident cost him his job, his license, and he returned to Hiawatha, where he sprung Jane from the sanitarium and considered how best to set things right. Not wanting to be his guinea pig any longer, Jane had killed Corvine in self-defense and buried him.
But there was a new piece to the puzzle. Somewhere along the line, in 1979, Corvine had checked out an old book that referenced the abandoned mining town of Milsbourne, Michigan, which happened to be fairly close to the cabin he owned at Hiawatha.
Meanwhile, in the present day, we learned that Elizabeth had been adopted, and that she so happened to hail from that remote, abandoned region of Michigan that Corvine had taken an interest in. It was to Milsbourne that the scholar Jamieson Monroe had made a pilgrimage in the mid-80's, losing his mind in the process.
And there was one other thing: Elizabeth's birth mother was one Ophelia Lancaster.
It was getting late. The sun was beginning to fade and, after making a stop in Detroit for lunch, we were pressing on towards the next major milestone, the Mackinac bridge. The weather had been all over the place; in Toledo, for instance, the skies had been fairly clear. Not a few minutes into Michigan, though, and we'd found the land shaded by a veil of storm clouds. Rain came and went. Sometimes it was light, other times torrential, and the skies only seemed to get darker the deeper we drove into the State.
Using the coordinates John Prince had given us, we were looking at something like a nine hour drive to a new section of the Hiawatha region. I wasn't happy to be returning. Frankly, I could have gone the rest of my life without ever seeing an expanse of trees so dense and dark as what awaited us there. But that was where the answers were, where they'd always been. I'd set out there on a quest for knowledge once already, but had overlooked things. I hadn't gone far enough. Now I was heading into what seemed to me the very heart of the matter—the spot that'd birthed the nightmare.
With any luck, we'd find Elizabeth there, too.
Surveys of Moorlake had yielded no clues. Except for the strange call that'd come through during our meeting with Elizabeth's parents, we'd heard nothing from her. Her whereabouts were a complete mystery.
“Shit!” Just then, something occurred to me, and I swerved onto the shoulder with a string of curses on my lips.
“The hell are you doing?” blurted Jake, who'd been half asleep.
“Her phone.” I threw the car into park and pulled my cell out of my pocket. “She still has it on her, right? I mean, probably? It's an iPhone, isn't it?”
Jake nodded, but he didn't seem to understand where I was going with this.
“There's an app you can use to track down lost phones, isn't there? Do you know her login? If we can log into her account, we can have a look at the GPS data for her phone. Even if she's in some place without reception we'll be able to see what direction she was heading in when she was last within range of a signal!” I hated myself for not thinking of it sooner.
“Oh, you're right. I know the one.” Tapping a few buttons on his phone, Jake pulled up the app in question. “I think I know her login. She uses the same password for everything.” He carefully typed a password and username into the necessary fields and the two of us tensed as the phone did some thinking. I leaned in so close that my cheek was nearly pressed to Jake's and watched as the app loaded up.
We were in.
Wrestling the phone out of Jake's grasp, I had a look at the options on-screen and, with a few taps, was able to pull up the phone's historical GPS data. A list of last
-known pings began to load before my eyes and I scrolled through them, zeroing in on the most recent.
“Now, get a load of this,” I said. There'd been a few hits in and around Moorlake. Then Toledo. From there, a few in lower Michigan. “She's been heading north. We've got her movements right here, down to the very minute. I don't know if her phone's got much battery left, but if this thing is to be believed, she probably hasn't made it into northern Michigan yet.” The most recent bit of data we had placed Elizabeth's phone a hundred miles north of Detroit, in roughly the same area we were now passing through. The route she'd taken to get there, too, closely mirrored the one we'd taken. “I was right. She's heading up north, probably to Milsbourne.”
Jake took the phone back, had a look for himself. “W-Well, maybe. But if she's close by... in this area, then maybe we can find her before she gets there. Do you think it's possible? Can we zero in on her and pick her up before she gets there on her own?”
“It's hard to say.” Considering the nature of the open road and all the ground we had yet to cover, there was no telling whether we'd run into her. Two people traveling down a similar path may never meet if the conditions and timing aren't just-so. “We can try, but the odds of us actually seeing her on the roadside are slim. If the thing inside of her has any sense, it won't let itself be seen. It'll keep its head down.”
“Well, if it's so goddamn smart, why hasn't it ditched the phone yet?” asked Jake.
I shrugged. “Hey, at least we know the Occupant has one weakness. It's as technologically inept as my grandfather. It didn't know to leave the phone behind. This is the one place we've got it beat.” I studied the map on Jake's phone once more and came up with a plan. “We're going to continue on our way, but do me a favor and refresh that every ten minutes or so. If our location happens to align exactly with hers—or if she should wander in some new direction, away from northern Michigan, we'll pursue her.”
Forest (The Afterlife Investigations Book 2) Page 14