Greta bit back a scream when the social worker slid the key into the padlock she’d placed in the old caretaker’s house.
She felt her blood rushing hot into her ears, pulsing in her head and behind her eyes. She expected the trees to split open and black mist to roll from the forest and wrap around her. Surely the land would not let her go – would not allow Greta to simply climb into this stranger’s car and drive away.
But no black fog arrived to claim her.
Greta carried her hard little suitcase packed with her best clothes, her diary and the few personal items worth keeping, or so the woman said. Greta would get all new things when she moved in with her aunt and uncle. She’d get proper things and go to a proper school and become a proper young woman.
As they drove from the grounds, the asylum faded behind them. She twisted around in her seat and watched the tall windows reflecting the midday sun. She wondered if her father watched the car disappear down the winding road.
Greta’s aunt and uncle resided in a rusted double-wide trailer situated between equally dilapidated trailers in the Upper Peninsula. The metal porch was rusted, looking like the bolts might fall away at any moment and send the structure collapsing into the weedy yard.
“Home sweet home,” her aunt said dryly.
She parked the pickup truck in a patch of dirt and shoved her door open.
Greta’s Uncle Peter, whom she’d only met once, walked onto the porch and watched the girl climb out of the truck.
His eyes slid over her body in an appraising, sickly way that made Greta’s skin crawl beneath her stuffy cotton dress.
“Wasn’t expectin’ no kids,” her aunt grumbled. “But I emptied half of my sewing room, and we put up a twin bed and dresser. It’ll have to do. In another year you can drive, and then you’re free to go if you want,” her aunt continued as she walked to the trailer, Greta close behind her.
“Good to see you again, Greta,” Peter said, rubbing a hand along her arm slowly and nearly touching her breast. She managed to cringe away before his fingers, nails dirty, brushed against her.
When her aunt left her alone in the room, the small space stuffed with boxes waist high, Greta almost let out a sob. It was sorrow — but more than that it was anger, hatred.
She hated her Uncle Peter and her Aunt Dolly. She wanted to shove them both down the basement stairs in the old farmhouse and listen to the thumps and groans as her father prepared them for the forest.
That night, when she tried to lock the door to the cramped little room, she found only a hole where the knob should have been.
She slept fitfully, waking at every creak.
When the sun rose and she heard her aunt making coffee, she finally slept, grateful to have survived the first night in the trailer and convinced that her uncle would not arrive to assault her.
She soon learned that he’d merely waited for Dolly to leave for her shift at the Shell Gas Station.
Greta opened her eyes around ten to find Peter filling the doorway, his shoulders so wide they touched the frame on either side. He held a belt in his hand, and she could see the bulge in his dirty sweatpants.
For the first week she fought him. She screamed and kicked and clawed at his face. He beat her senseless and raped her when she was too exhausted to fight back.
By week two, she’d learned to lie still. It was over faster and it hurt less if she didn’t resist him.
She’d never been a nighttime dreamer. For most of her young life, she closed her eyes and fell into a black void, waking in the morning with no more memories than an occasional jaunt to the bathroom.
Maribelle had dreamed. She’d whisper her dreams to Greta while she brushed her teeth. Dreams of flying on the backs of winged cats or of swimming deep into the sea and finding jewels and glowing flowers. Sometimes Greta thought Maribelle lied about the dreams. How could they be real? Then she heard patients in the asylum talking of their vivid, sometimes fantastical dreams and she started to wonder if Maribelle was insane like the people locked in the buildings.
But when she moved into her aunt and uncle’s trailer, Greta started to dream.
She dreamed every night of the asylum grounds. She dreamed of the field filled with bodies and the blood-spattered basement floor. She dreamed that the land was breathing, rising and falling beneath thick grass or heavy snow.
When it rained, the earth cracked open, gulping, but it wasn’t water that fell from the swollen gray clouds.
It was blood.
38
Then
“Where am I?” Crystal asked.
She’d come to in a dark room, strapped to a wooden chair.
The floor beneath her bare feet was dirty. A single dark candle in a silver base sat on a rickety table missing one of its legs.
Crystal couldn’t see Greta but sensed her nearby, watching.
Dark tattered curtains hung over the windows, but along their edges Crystal could see night had fallen. She struggled to make sense of the room, at first assuming she’d awoken in the abandoned house in the woods, but this house seemed… more intact. No mold crawled up the walls. Gone were the rotted floorboards and sagging walls replaced by a simple farmhouse kitchen.
“Where are we?” Crystal murmured.
Her head seemed heavy and waterlogged. It took enormous effort to hold it up. She feared if she let it fall forward, her neck would snap and her head would roll across the dusty floor. It was a crazy thought, but one she couldn’t shake.
The woman still didn’t answer. Crystal sensed she stood behind her to the right.
“Left to the ghosts,” Greta said, stepping from a corner and walking along the kitchen counter, her finger trailing through a layer of silty dust. She held the finger close to her face and licked it off. “That’s what a reporter wrote when they shuttered the asylum last year. It’s all been left to the ghosts. And, boy, are there a lot of those.” Greta laughed, and the sound fell empty in the room.
“I grew up in this house,” Greta confessed. “My father was the caretaker at the Northern Michigan Asylum. God how they cowered when Joseph Claude walked into the ward. Even after he’d lost his mind, they feared him.”
Crystal steadied her eyes on the woman, but she slid in and out of the shadows like vapor, and Crystal’s eyelids kept tumbling closed.
She leaned her head back and gazed at the cracked plaster ceiling.
“I’m a nurse,” Greta said. “Did I ever tell you that?” She let out a harsh laugh. “Nurses today have access to drugs my father would have murdered someone for.”
Greta grabbed a chair and spun it around, straddling it and balancing her chin on the back.
Her dark curls were gone, replaced by limp silver-blond hair that stuck to her sweaty cheeks.
“Not that he was a drug addict. Not at all. But drugs would have made everything easier, cleaner. God knows it has for me. You can’t avoid the blood, of course. But there are so many ways to drain blood from a human body. Cleaner ways.”
Crystal trembled in her chair. The warmth of the room drifted near her, but didn’t penetrate her body. Her bones felt cold. Her teeth began to chatter loudly.
Greta studied her.
“You’re coming down from the anesthesia,” Greta explained. “But don’t worry, I’ve prepared your room, Crystal. I’m sure you’ll love it here.”
Crystal woke and for one, two, three seconds, she didn’t remember. Her first thought was that she needed to pick up flowers for her mother’s grave.