Dark Omen
A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel
J.R. Erickson
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
Also by J.R. Erickson
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright © 2020 J.R. Erickson
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visit
JREricksonauthor.com
Author’s Note
Thanks so much for picking up a Northern Michigan Asylum Novel. I want to offer a disclaimer before you dive into the story. This is an entirely fictional novel. Although there was once a real place known as The Northern Michigan Asylum - which inspired me to write these books - it is in no way depicted within them. Although my story takes place there, the characters in this story are not based on any real people who worked at this asylum or were patients; any resemblance to individuals, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Likewise, the events which take place in the novel are not based on real events, and any resemblance to real events is also coincidental.
In truth, nearly every book I have read about the asylum, later known as the Traverse City State Hospital, was positive. This holds true for the stories of many of the staff who worked there as well. I live in the Traverse City area and regularly visit the grounds of the former asylum. It’s now known as The Village at Grand Traverse Commons. It was purchased in 2000 by Ray Minervini and the Minervini Group who have been restoring it since that time. Today, it’s a mixed-use space of boutiques, restaurants and condominiums. If you ever visit the area, I encourage you to visit The Village at Grand Traverse Commons. You can experience first-hand the asylums - both old and new - and walk the sprawling grounds.
Dedication
For my sister, Cherie.
Prologue
The Northern Michigan Asylum
1966
Greta Claude
“I won’t!”
Greta woke to the sound of Maribelle’s shouts echoing up the stairs.
She blinked at the ceiling and sat up, pulling the blanket to her chin.
“You’ll do as I say,” their father, Joseph, bellowed.
Greta cringed at the sharp crack that followed and knew Maribelle’s cheek was probably throbbing from the impact of Joseph’s large hand.
Maribelle screamed and began to cry.
Greta jumped from the bed and raced down the stairs as the front door swung closed.
Through the window, Greta watched her twin sister, Maribelle, disappear into the grassy trail behind their house.
Joseph stood in the kitchen, his hands fisted at his sides. He turned and glared at Greta, and she shrank from his furious gaze.
“Go clean the basement,” he snarled. “I’m going after your sister.”
He stormed out the door, toward the wooded path that led from the caretaker’s house, where they’d lived since birth, into the acres of forests surrounding the Northern Michigan Asylum.
“Don’t hurt her,” Greta cried out, but her voice was drowned by his heavy footfalls on the porch steps.
When she reached the concrete floor in the basement, the stench of blood and urine overpowered her. Other smells mingled with the odor; smells Greta had learned to associate with death.
Greta pulled her t-shirt over her nose, letting it hang there. She flailed her hand through the darkness, the drawn-out seconds in the black basement causing her heart to crash against her chest as if it too wanted to race back up the stairs and into the daylight.
She found the lightbulb string and yanked, illuminating the blood.
Dark and wet, it lay in a fresh puddle in the center of the floor. The body was gone, but drag marks left the pool and streaked toward the stairs.
Greta looked down and realized she was standing in one of the bloody drag marks. She peeled off her white socks, ruined, and stuffed them into the crumpled garbage bag her father had left.
She grabbed the bucket from the laundry basin and turned on the tap. Rust-colored water spewed into the bucket. She rinsed it and filled it again. The water had the sulfurous odor of rotten eggs, but was preferable to the fluids coating the basement floor.
As she wet a rag and returned to the blood, she hummed “Ring Around the Rosie,” a song she and Maribelle liked to sing when they ran through the woods behind the asylum.
Greta sopped up the blood and dipped the rag into the bucket, wringing it and watching the red swirl into the brown water. When the brown water turned red, Greta emptied the bucket and refilled it.
She refilled the bucket five times before the pool of blood was washed away. She swept the bit of remaining water into the drain in the floor.
Greta stuffed the soiled rags into the black plastic bag, her eyes flitting over a single white tennis shoe, the laces stained pink. She tied the bag and then scrubbed her hands with lye soap until they were raw and tingling.
She turned off the light and hurried to her room, to put on a dress before Mrs. Martel, their home-school teacher, arrived.
Maribelle arrived only minutes before Mrs. Martel. She limped into the house with a tear-streaked face.
Greta could see a purple bruise spreading on Maribelle’s knee.
“Come on,” Greta insisted. “Let’s clean you up, quick.”
Maribelle cried quietly as Greta sponged off her face and quickly braided her unruly dark hair. She pulled Maribelle’s nightgown over her head and cringed at hand-shaped welts on Maribelle’s back.
“I hate him,” Maribelle whispered. “I hate him so much.”
1
Now
June 14th, 1991
Bette drove through the eight-foot, wrought-iron gates marking the entrance to Eternal Rest, the cemetery where they’d buried her mother eleven years before.
Parking on the grassy shoulder, Bette popped the trunk and stepped from her car.
The cemetery was quiet at four-thirty in the afternoon. The trees watc
hed, large and silent, as Bette pulled out the box that she and Crystal took to their mother’s grave every year. It contained the Edgar Allen Poe poetry book they’d take turns reciting from, a handful of photographs, and Bette’s letter to their mother. Crystal was bringing the flowers and she’d have her own letter.
Bette knelt in front of the marble headstone, heart shaped and engraved with her mother’s name: Joanna Kay Meeks. December 15, 1947 – June 14, 1980. Their father’s name, the death date not yet filled in, stood next to Jo’s on the headstone, and Bette cringed whenever she saw it.
Bette and Crystal’s father had offered to buy plots for his girls when their mother died, but they had both balked. At eleven and thirteen, they were hardly planning their future deaths.
As the minutes ticked by, Bette stood and paced away from the grave. She gazed at the winding road that led through the hilly cemetery, searching for Crystal’s distinctive sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle.
Her sister didn’t appear.
At five o’clock, irritated, Bette put the box in her trunk and drove to a payphone.
She dialed Crystal’s number and left a message before calling her own number, on the chance that Crystal had gotten confused and gone to the house. Bette’s machine picked up.
When an hour passed and still no Crystal, Bette drove home and called her sister again.
Crystal’s machine picked up.
“Hi, you’ve missed me. Hopefully I’m on a daring adventure, but if all goes well, I’ll eventually make it home to call you back.”
“Crystal, it’s Bette. Again.” Her voice took on the high-pitched notes of early anxiety. “In case you forgot, we have dinner reservations, and we’re planting flowers on Mom’s grave tonight. You know, like we’ve done on June fourteenth for the last ten years.”
Bette hung up and stared at her clock.
Their dinner reservations were in ten minutes and obviously they wouldn’t be making it.
For another twenty minutes, Bette sat at the kitchen table, fuming, and silently willing the door to open and her free-spirited sister to come bouncing through with tales of rescuing a kitten in the road or driving a hitchhiker halfway across the county to make it on time for the birth of his child. Two stories which had actually happened, but never on the anniversary of their mother’s death.
Crystal had never forgotten their mother’s anniversary, and she’d never missed their yearly ritual.
As Bette tapped her foot and watched the clock, the sense of urgency in her stomach curdled into fear, and she realized that had been the root of her anxiety all along: not frustration that they’d be late to dinner, but fear. The fear crept up her legs and settled in the base of her spine. It clicked its fangs and tapped its sharpened claws. It would gnaw a hole right through her if she didn’t do something.
The fear was unwarranted. Crystal was only an hour and a half late, but it had gripped Bette in its talons just the same.
A photo of Crystal and Bette, arm in arm, sat on the bureau next to the kitchen table. The bureau was filled with dishes, things their mother had loved and that Bette, still living in her childhood home, had never been able to part with.
She gazed at the silver-framed photograph. Crystal’s red-gold hair hung long and wavy, flowing over each shoulder. Bette’s own hair, also long, was stick straight and dark.
“Where are you?” she whispered to the picture.
Unable to sit still another moment, Bette stood and grabbed the phone, dialing her sister again and slamming the phone down when the machine picked up. Next, she called her father, gritting her teeth when his voicemail clicked on.
“Dad, it’s Bette. Call me right away.”
Bette walked stiffly to her car and climbed behind the wheel.
Though less than two years separated Bette and Crystal, Bette had often felt like a much older sister. She was the practical, sensible one. At twenty-four, she had a serious job as a research assistant for an anthropology professor, and she was well on her way to receiving her doctorate.
Crystal, on the other hand, had spent the first two years after high school traveling the world. She’d finally returned a year before and enrolled at Michigan State University. She worked a series of minimum-wage jobs and refused to do anything out of obligation. She loved to say, “Should is not in my vocabulary.”
Bette let herself into Crystal’s apartment with her spare key, sweeping through the space quickly. Crystal wasn’t home, but Bette peeked into every room just the same.
In Crystal’s bathroom, she spotted a damp towel and a long t-shirt, probably what Crystal had worn to bed the night before.
A hand-scrawled note was stuck to the vanity mirror.
“The day I met you, a part of me dissolved,
Slipped into the earth and rooted beneath you, grew up inside of you,
You are always with me now. I am always with you.”
Bette read the words under her breath.
Weston Meeks hadn’t signed his name, but he hadn’t needed to.
Bette had heard how the man spoke to her sister.
The professor, who taught poetry at Michigan State University, had swept Crystal off her feet. Despite the age gap, ten years give or take, Crystal had fallen madly, stupidly in love with the man.
“Apparently, the feelings are mutual,” Bette said dryly.
A calendar hung in Crystal’s kitchen with a few notes scribbled in the small boxes. She didn’t post her work schedule and probably didn’t record half of her appointments. Crystal simply wasn’t a planner.
She had however, noted the anniversary of their mother’s death and written: “Evening with Bette.”
Except she hadn’t shown up, and her apartment was empty.
Bette walked across the hall to apartment four. It belonged to Crystal’s friend, Garrett. Bette had only met him once. He was a beautiful gay man who dressed impeccably, and often sat with Crystal in their little apartment courtyard drinking wine and lamenting his latest break-up.
Bette knocked on the door.
She could hear music in the apartment. It sounded like Michael Jackson.
The door swung open and Garett grinned at her. He wore gym shorts and a tank top, wrist and ankle weights adorning his limbs.
“Bette!” he exclaimed. “How are you? I’m just getting my exercise in.” He jogged in place, sweat glistening on his tanned face. “No Crystal?” he asked, making a sad face and peeking past her down the hall.
“No, she was supposed to meet me. Have you seen her?” Bette asked.
“Billie Jean!” he gushed. “This is my all-time favorite Michael Jackson song.” He snapped his fingers. “I saw her this morning. I think she was going for coffee. We didn’t chat long. I was itching to get a meatloaf in the crock-pot. My friend David’s coming over tonight, and I’m hoping he’ll see how domesticated I can be.” He winked at her.
Bette shuffled her feet and glanced back towards Crystal’s closed door. “Did she say she had somewhere else to go after getting coffee?”
He wrinkled his brow and shook his head.
“I’m afraid I barely let her get a word in edge-wise — hot date and all.”
“All right. Thank Garret. Tell her to call me if you see her.”
“Sure thing, Betts.” He grinned, giving her a salute and closing his door.
Bette left the apartment building and stood in the parking lot. Crystal’s blue VW Beetle was nowhere in sight.
Bette climbed into her own car and drove to the coffee shop.
Crystal worked at Sacred Grounds part time, mostly on weekends, but she was friends with the other employees and dropped by at least once a day for a cup of coffee or to chat with her friends.
Rick stood at the counter, wiping down the surface. Crystal had told Bette that Rick had an obsession with Nirvana and in particular Kurt Cobain. He’d even grown out and dyed his hair to match the singer’s dishwater-blond, uncombed look.
“Hey Bette, how’s it going?” he asked.
>
Bette glanced quickly around at the tables.
“Has Crystal been in?” Bette asked, moving closer to a booth in the corner where a redhead sat with her back to the coffee counter.
The woman laughed and turned sideways. Her laugh was deep and gravelly, not like Crystal’s at all, and when she turned Bette realized the woman was well into her fifties.
Rick nodded.
“She came in this morning and had a coffee and one of Minerva’s famous butterscotch scones. We’ve got two left if you’re interested.” He pointed at the display case showcasing the sugary treats.
Bette’s stomach felt like a block of cement.
“No, thanks. About what time was that?”
Rick turned and looked at the Cheshire-cat clock that hung over the trays of variously colored coffee mugs.
“I’d say nine-ish.”
“Okay, thanks.” Bette started toward the door and then turned back. “Was she alone?”
Rick scratched his stubbly chin and nodded.
“Yeah. Her friend was in here. Um, her name starts with a G. Grace, maybe… But Crystal didn’t stay for long.”
Dark Omen: A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel Page 1