“You were committed then?” Sarah asked, returning to her seat.
“Who told you this story, dear? Could they have skipped over that most important part?
“A young man. His name is Will.”
“Will Slater?”
Sarah nodded, hoping she was not breaching a confidence that Will and Delila shared.
“An absolute tragedy what happened to his family. Although tragedy implies something accidental, and it surely was not.”
“Why were you committed, Delila? What happened in Kerry Manor?”
At the mention of the name, Delila clutched the lace tablecloth beneath her fingers and closed her eyes.
“I used to believe that old adage sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me, and then I met Ethel.”
“The Ethel who burned her family?”
“Yes. She was long gone when I encountered her, but her presence, her spirit perhaps, remained.”
“She haunted the house?”
“After the day I got rid of her, I blocked everything out. For two years I pretended it never happened, and then one night, Christie’s little girl started singing Ethel’s nursery rhyme. I near died in my chair. After that, I knew I had to unearth… something. I’m still not sure what, but I couldn’t live with this horrible, terrifying mystery. What if I woke one morning, and she again stood behind me in the mirror?”
Sarah saw a drop of Delila’s cranberry juice slip down the outside of her mug, staining the white lace. The red fanned out in a tiny flower.
“I became very interested in the occult. Christie hated it. She believed in not speaking about the things that scared or hurt us. Today, they‘d call it denial. Christie was on the outside looking in. She glimpsed the supernatural for an instant. It’s different when it moves in and takes up shop in your little life. There’s not enough room. I don’t understand what Ethel wanted, but I learned things about her. I learned that she too was in the Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane. Her parents sent her there, just one year before she killed them. I learned of a brotherhood of doctors who experimented on patients who were touched by the supernatural.”
“Can you tell me the story, Delila? Of Kerry Manor?”
“I will, yes, I will. But first, I need to know what’s at stake here. Why have you come, young lady?”
Sarah pictured Sammy and tears pricked her eyes. She pulled in a heavy breath and let it out slow.
“My brother was murdered at Kerry Manor on Halloween.”
Delila’s eyes opened wide, and her mouth fell open. She touched a gold cross suspended around her neck.
“They have not found his murderer?”
Sarah shook her head. “But it’s so much more complicated than that. His wife has been acting strangely since it happened. Sometimes she sings… an old song, and she sounds like a little girl. She has lapses in memory. She has no memory of the night my brother died.”
Delila looked grave.
“My heart goes out to you, Sarah. Another life stolen by Kerry Manor.” She shook her head, disgusted. “In August 1961, I visited Kerry Manor with my future husband. It was an abandoned house, a place kids explored, but for me…” She paused, searching for words. “It had an energy, an attraction I guess. I returned to the house late that night with my niece, Christie. She was my niece, but I was only two years her senior - we were more like sisters. Christie walked around outside, but I insisted on going in the house. I always had an adventurous spirit, often to my detriment, I fear. I walked into the house, and the moment I stepped across the threshold, I sensed a presence. I should have turned and left instantly. I heard the voice of a little girl. She was singing a nursery rhyme.”
“What was it?” Sarah whispered.
“One for sorrow, two for mirth-”
“Three for a funeral, and four for a birth,” Sarah finished, grinding her teeth and wondering when she would wake up from this horrible nightmare.
“The girl attacked me, the spirit. She wasn’t physical, but she had power. I started to scream and she clawed my face, though later I tried to convince myself that I clawed my own face, got spooked, panicked. Except the next morning she was there. Everywhere I went, she hovered in the shadows. Her laughter and songs invaded my dreams, my every thought. But she was not merely a nuisance. She hurt me. Somehow, she gathered energy and hurt me. I was terrified she would hurt Christie. After a few days, Christie’s husband had me committed.”
“Her husband?”
Delila smiled and shook her head sadly.
“I didn’t blame him. Well, maybe I did at the time, but to them I appeared insane. I had lost my marbles. They didn’t know what to do, and just down the road was this magnificent place filled with doctors who could save me.”
“The asylum.”
“Yes. And later I realized they had saved me, for if I had not gone into the asylum and met the people who could rid me of this spirit, she would have driven me to my death.”
Delila took a sip of juice, but her hand shook, and she returned the cup with a clank to the table.
“Don’t let my age fool you,” she told Sarah. “I’m as steady as a boulder. This,” she held her shaking hands in front of her face “is fear.”
“How did you get rid of her?” Sarah asked, sliding to the edge of her seat.
“There’s an odd little place on the grounds of the old asylum. Kids these days call it the hippie tree. Are you aware of it?”
Sarah nodded.
She had heard of it. Kids liked to go there to graffiti and smoke pot. One of her clients claimed people called it a portal to hell.
“All urban legends begin with a kernel of truth,” Delila said. “I believe that. And in the case of the hippie tree, I know it to be true. We trapped her there - Ethel, or whatever dark thing Ethel had become.”
“How did you know what to do?”
“There was a woman at the asylum, Sophia. She could see spirits. Today they’d call her a medium. She was the first person who saw Ethel, who finally proved to me I was not insane. She told me about another patient at the asylum. He was an alcoholic who’d gone in and out of the hospital several times. He too had been directed to the asylum because a spirit haunted him. This man told me where to go and how to rid myself of Ethel.”
“And it worked?” Sarah asked
Delila nodded, but her eyes clouded and her mouth turned down.
“And yet… terrible things still surrounded Kerry Manor. I returned to that basin of trees at the asylum, years later, and I searched for the child’s dress Christie and I had nailed into the tree. It was gone.”
“A dress?”
Delila nodded.
“Christie went to Kerry Manor and retrieved an item of Ethel’s, a green dress. We did a ritual in that basin of trees. I fear the act only detached Ethel from me, and it was only a matter of time before someone would come along and release her. I must tell you, Sarah, I learned many things after that summer. I spent years visiting a therapist who did exorcisms.”
“Exorcisms?”
Delila nodded.
“Until you’re touched by the unseen world, all these words are just hocus-pocus, scary bedtime stories. But he told me tales of unimaginable things. He reckoned Ethel wanted to possess me. She was waiting for me to break down enough to become available to her. Your brother’s wife sounds as if Ethel has possessed her.”
Sarah bit her lip and studied the woman before her. Delila’s eyes bored into her own. The woman believed every word she spoke.
“What do I do if she is possessed?”
“My friend is dead now some twenty years,” Delila admitted, “but I’m still in contact with his daughter. Let me reach out to her. The people who work in this field must do so in obscurity. Our society is far too scientific to allow their stories into the light, but they exist, my dear. I will say this: I wonder if the key is not the asylum.”