The Occupant: The Afterlife Investigations #3

by Ibsen, Ambrose

  “It would come out later that he was bringing her there, to the very shaft where he'd been buried, preparing her for some kind of big event. He called it the 'Communion of the Abyss', and it involved the two of them spending time near the mines on an almost nightly basis. This kept on for a little while. And then one day, the girl just up and vanished. Joseph acted concerned, plead ignorance, but those who knew about his little trips into the hills didn't believe him.

  “Some eavesdroppers had theories. They thought he'd killed the girl, abandoned her in the mineshaft for some reason or another. Some claimed to have seen him fucking the girl—his own daughter—in the light of the moon, and there were murmurs from some of the womenfolk before Sarah vanished that she was with child.

  “People were on edge after Sarah went missing, but they didn't really get the dots connected until others in town—mostly those who were close to Sarah, friends and loved ones—started disappearing, too. The girl's mother was the first. Then a childhood friend. Some others. All of them within the space of a week or two. And always disappearing by night.

  “People got wise, managed to trace the disappearances to Joseph's strange behavior around the mines. A big group got together, and without telling Joseph, they set out for the mineshaft where he'd had his accident—left abandoned by the townies ever since the collapse—and discovered something wretched inside.

  “They found the girl, Sarah, at the bottom of this mine shaft. Somehow, it'd been cleared, and when the sun or moon was right, you could see right to the very bottom. She was down there, her belly mighty round, and looked up at the townsfolk with black eyes. That wasn't all, though. The bodies of the missing people—her loved ones—were down there, too. Or, at least, what was left of them. She'd taken to eating them, drinking their blood.

  “This caused a sensation. Story goes that they dragged Jospeh out of bed, brought him to the mine. The angry mob forced him to explain himself, and he spilled his guts right then and there. He told them all about the thing he'd met in the mineshaft—the thing which had since taken up residence in his daughter—and about how it had promised him his life, along with vast riches, in exchange. The townspeople were outraged and executed him on the spot. It's said they threw him into the pit, where he died on impact, and then dropped so much burning refuse into the shaft that they burned Sarah alive. People from town stood outside the shaft in shifts, keeping the fires going, until they knew for sure the girl was dead. That's how scared they were of her.

  “But it didn't end there. Shortly after the girl's death, the water in town—clear and clean as anyone could ask for—started going bad. People ended up with a hideous bug, and those that didn't die were left severely disfigured. And one day, a clear one, if the stories are true, it began to rain. The rain was scaldingly hot, though, and people who got caught in it died excruciating deaths. This boiling hot rain took out most of the crops and livestock, too. They all knew why it was happening—it was revenge. The devil from the hills was striking back at them for their killing of the Lancaster girl.

  “Milsbourne emptied out after that. It was too dangerous a place—desecrated. People left their homes, their jobs, and fanned out across the UP. Some went far away, others relocated to nearby towns. Those that remained were mostly there because they didn't have a choice. In the 1870's, stories began to come out of a terrible, black-eyed thing that sometimes wandered the woods at night. Future generations, like mine, would think of this as a kind of urban legend—Jersey Devil bullshit. But to the people alive at that time, it was true beyond doubt. They feared that the thing hadn't been killed when they'd burned the girl alive—that some aspect of it was still active out there—and so most of them ran away from it.

  “You can imagine how difficult this made things for the survivors of that line. The Lancaster family was a big one, I guess, and even though they didn't have nothing to do with what Joseph had gotten involved with, they were shunned, if not outright murdered. People believed that, so long as that line kept on, the thing in the woods would never stop. It was stalking around, waiting to take hold of a female Lancaster, so it could resume its work. It was a tradition, honored even by some of the clergy in the area, to murder any female baby born to the Lancaster line as a precaution. This fell out of practice as the years passed and the Lancasters naturally moved away or dwindled. Some that moved away even took on other last names for fear that people from Milsbourne would come looking for them.

  “Come to the present day, not a lot of folk live around here. Eli was the last Lancaster in this area that I knew of, and he was childless. He did have a kid sister, though, Ophelia, who had a kid of her own. I think it was a girl. Now, Ophelia was kind of unstable. Poor girl had a lot of issues, and I guess hearing about the Lancaster curse all her life, she tried to kill herself numerous times—and even tried to kill her daughter at one point. A lot of people who live in the area these days don't know the full story, or else don't believe in it. But Eli and his sister Ophelia did. They stayed away from the woods for a long time, fearing that the wandering thing might take hold of her. And when Ophelia had a girl of her own, she panicked. Ophelia failed to kill her daughter, and I think someone in town reported her to the authorities, because the kid got taken away and no one ever heard about her again. Shortly after that, Ophelia killed herself.

  “Some years prior to that, there was some nosy writer fella who came poking around. Or maybe he was a teacher or something. He showed up in town, asked the locals if they knew anything about Milsbourne, and offered to pay anyone who was willing to talk. He was curious, interested in local history, he said. Eli, who was hard up for cash at the time and thinking there was no harm in it, started telling this guy bits and pieces. The fella kept asking questions though, poking around, until he heard about the Lancaster curse, and he decided to look into it. Marched off into those woods all by himself one day, hoping to write a book about what he found. I'll never know why supposedly brilliant men insist on doing such dumb shit, but he did it. He went out, saw the town, the mineshaft for himself. And when he came back, he wasn't quite the same. He was scared shitless, talked about how he'd seen something moving down there, and how at night he'd felt himself being watched and followed.

  “Everyone in town thought that was the last of him, but some time later he came back, really pushy like, and demanded to see Eli again. He wanted to meet everyone in Eli's family, and one night he made his intentions clear. He'd come back to kill every Lancaster he could find. The man was armed to the teeth, had a car full of guns and knives. Said that until every last Lancaster was dead, the thing in that mineshaft would linger on. He'd had nightmares about it ever since his first visit, had seen it everywhere he went. Eli found out about this, tried to talk him down, and then—because he had no choice—killed the man himself. He's buried out here somewhere, where no one will ever find him. The townsfolk backed him up, told authorities who came looking that the guy had gone hiking and never returned.

  “I don't know what the thing really is—if it's really a devil and all that. After what I saw last night, I'd say that 'devil' is as good a name as any. You called it the 'Occupant'. Never heard that before. I'll confess that, until last night, I'd believed all of this was some kind of wild yarn. I'd been told these stories since I was a boy, but a part of me believed it was all just meant to keep me out of the woods at night. I'd never had reason to think on it too deeply. Not until last night. Eli, though, he believed. He'd always believed, to some degree. The older he got, the more stock he seemed to put into the whole thing.

  “This awful thing is like an animal. It lives in the ground, eating its loved ones. It does that for nine months once it's been impregnated, and I imagine that, when it's gotten its fill, it sheds the host body like a snake and slithers out. I don't know how to stop the damn thing, but God help us if it ever manages to see it all through. I can't even imagine what that thing might look like once born... what it might do to this world. It would be the devil made flesh.

>   “This thing that Joseph Lancaster disturbed on that day when he should have died has lingered in these woods ever since. People tried to send it back—priests, especially, have tried their hand at 'exorcising' it. Did no good. When they'd done all they could think of to send the monster back, the people of Milsbourne abandoned the town. It was the only path left to them. This thing should have stayed in the woods. It should have have wandered aimlessly until the end of days, when God Himself would be its judge. But somehow, Milsbourne's best-kept secret has come home to roost. It's real. All of it.”

  Paul looked tired, the words having left his parched lips a mile a minute.

  Still standing near the door, I was left reeling by this new knowledge.

  Suddenly, everything was much clearer.

  This thing we called the Occupant was some kind of malignant spirit that had first been sighted in the 1860's, thanks to Joseph Lancaster. It should have been a wandering, impotent thing, relegated to the Michigan woods—and it would have been—if not for the work of Dr. W. R. Corvine. In the 1970's, mourning the loss of his wife and daughter, Corvine had invited his niece, Jane, to a cabin in the Hiawatha region to establish a link to supernatural forces. Desperate for results, his experiments began to degenerate into madness. It was only after abandoning all ethics and experimenting with untested drugs that his subject, Jane, had made contact with the only supernatural presence in the region. The Occupant, having wandered aimlessly for a century, was drawn to Jane and given a temporary refuge during the doctor's nightly sessions.

  Jane, however, wasn't a Lancaster. She could not fulfill the promise that Jospeh Lancaster had made a hundred years prior. And so, abandoning Jane to a sanitarium, he set out looking for someone who could fill the role of host. Somewhere along the line, and probably due to a nudge from the Occupant, Corvine learned of Milsbourne, Michigan, found out about the Lancaster curse, and then started looking for a descendant of that doomed line. He struck gold when, taking on a post at Chaythe Asylum in the 80's, he was introduced to Enid Lancaster. Considering his renown as a physician, Corvine could have worked most anywhere he pleased. That he'd chosen an Ohio asylum where a descendant of the Lancaster line was admitted was no coincidence.

  But Corvine didn't have all the answers. He'd done some research, tried to channel the Occupant into Enid and had reproduced, to some extent, the Communion of the Abyss, as Jospeh Lancaster had done. Jane maintained that Corvine may have impregnated the girl, and the general aesthetic of the sub-cellar chamber at Chaythe Asylum did call to mind the subterrane setting of the mineshaft in Milsbourne. Eventually, by experimenting on Enid's mind the way he'd done with Jane, Corvine created a perfect host for the Occupant.

  Unbeknownst to him however, Corvine himself had been an unwitting host to the entity. Having been touched by death in his years, Corvine, who'd had contact with the Occupant at Hiawatha, had brought it back with him to Ohio when he began his experiments with Enid. Jane had stressed to me the Occupant's ability to act through all those who were touched by death—I myself had felt the thing's pull over my life, and had been utilized in similar fashion, to bring Elizabeth Morrissey to the asylum.

  Corvine's experiments did not yield the expected result. The Third Ward Incident took place, resulting in multiple deaths. The doctor managed to strike his patient dead before she could escape, but knew its spirit would linger in the asylum, as it had done in the Michigan woods before he and Jane had disturbed it. Understanding the severity of the situation, Corvine had sprung Jane from the sanitarium and hoped to somehow channel the spirit afresh—to “close the door”—and send it back to wherever it had first come from. Jane, unwilling to be his guinea pig any longer, killed and buried him.

  For decades, until Jake, Elizabeth and I became involved, the Occupant had wandered the shuttered Chaythe Asylum.

  Just like W. R. Corvine, I'd been used to bring the Occupant into contact with a female Lancaster. Corvine had done so more or less knowingly. I hadn't known that I was being manipulated by forces outside myself until just recently however—my involvement had seemed like nothing but a strange coincidence. Had I known what was really going on, I never would have visited the asylum. I never would have gotten to know Elizabeth, or signed on to advise her damn club, for that matter.

  During our exploration of the asylum, Elizabeth had gotten separated. Jake and I had found her in the sub-cellar chamber where Corvine had done his experiments—re-enacting the Communion of the Abyss—but what had happened to her in the interim was a mystery. It was clear to me now that the entity had made its move during that time, taking hold of her. I didn't understand the mechanism behind its possession. Elizabeth was a Lancaster, it turned out, and perhaps her interest in the supernatural had made her more open to possession. Her experience with death—caused by a murder attempt by her mother, Ophelia, while she was still living near Milsbourne—may have been the event that'd primed her as a vessel.

  At some point, Elizabeth and Jake had had sex. Whether it had occurred before or after the trip to the asylum, I was unsure. Whatever the case, that'd been the last piece of the puzzle, because upon my return from Hiawatha, I was informed by a battered and frightened Jake that the Occupant had taken hold and that Elizabeth was now missing. We tracked her all the way to northern Michigan, feeling all the while that we were being led.

  And now, I realized beyond a shadow of a doubt, we had been. For a very clear purpose.

  The Occupant had known we'd come looking for the girl. I, her trusted professor. Jake, her loving boyfriend. The entity intended to use the two of us as fuel for the body that now gestated within Elizabeth's womb. We were to be eaten by the girl, just as Sarah Lancaster's loved ones had been used for sustenance in the 1860's.

  It all made sense. The lines were all connected.

  And I felt more hopeless than ever before for this knowledge.

  I was going to thank Paul for what he'd told me, and was thinking of other questions I might ask him, when the fog outside the window thinned and I glimpsed something in the corner of my eye.

  There was someone standing outside the cabin.

  And they were staring through the fog.

  I tensed, immediately pulling my gun out. Paul flinched, backing against the wall. Nodding towards the window, my voice shriveling into a whisper, I said, “We have company.”

  19

  The Occupant came in through the window, climbing in effortlessly and landing on the weathered floors with nary a sound. Backlit by the moon, its body wreathed in fog, it looked to the two of us in turn, as if trying to decide who to strike down first. Its face was so inhuman that its expressions defied easy description, and yet as it stared at us, mouth framed by rust—traces of its last meal—I thought I could make out something of amusement.

  Paul screamed. Before the thing had entered, he'd been panting, trying to calm down after sharing all he knew. Now that the Occupant was inside, he loosed a terrible howl of fear and clamped his hand over his mouth, as though his retelling of Milsbourne history had somehow summoned it here. Despite the injury to his ankle—great terror often trumps great pain, in my experience—he stood and began hobbling towards me, his intention quite clear. He wanted to take the gun from me, or else use me as a shield.

  The movement caught the Occupant's eye and it reached out, taking hold of Paul's shirt and dragging him close. With a pale hand wrapped around the back of his head, the occupant brought its drooping maw to his throat and bit deeply. Windpipe, crucial vessels and more were wrenched from his neck, and with a face dressed in gore, the Occupant turned to me with what I took for a crimson smile.

  I fumbled with the door, tripped over my own feet as I sought to escape, and clumsily fired off two rounds, both of which ended up in the old cabin's exterior. Unwilling to watch the grotesque spectacle any longer and having no faith in my ability to fire a gun, I took off running as fast as my legs would carry me, sprinting back onto the main road between the rows of cabins and into the woods beyon
d.

  It wasn't long before I hit what seemed to be an incline. The fog rolled by in thick waves, and the sparse trees on this fringe of Milsbourne made it easier to see. I was going up a hill, a very high and steep one by the looks of it. It was so steep in places that I had to crawl on hands and knees just to make it up to the top. When I did, I kept on running, sticking to the empty spaces where the moon was bright and pausing only, at the very top, to look back at the road I'd just left behind.

  Striding calmly, confidently through the fog after me was the Occupant. It could have run after me, could have closed the gap between us without the least difficulty, but seemed to be enjoying the chase on some level. Like a persistence hunter tracking a prey animal, the Occupant was content to sit back and wait for me to tire myself out. Then, when my heart was on the verge of giving out and I'd grown optimistic enough to entertain the idea of survival, it would descend upon me. Like a spider, Paul had described it.

  I kept racing, finding myself on a series of rolling hills. Some proved steep, others less so, but the burning in my quads made it difficult to continue at my breakneck pace. Something was going to give if I didn't slow it down. Gritting my teeth, I scaled the summit of a real ball-buster of a hill and then started looking for a place to hide.

  Mixed in among the trees were large outcroppings of rock. The terrain was changing; the farther I went in this direction, the rockier the scene became. Was I getting close to the old copper mines? Jogging down a gentle decline and peering into the fog-dense spaces between certain of the trees, I spied what looked like old mining equipment—primitive carts boasting large, rusted gears, piles of rusted chains and chunks of gnarled old wood that looked like they'd once been handles to shovels and picks. One of the geared apparatuses was rather large, and without thinking I raced around to its other side, dropping to the ground and pressing my back against it.