J.R. Erickson
Dark Omen
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 watched, 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.