Stephen regarded Dr. Strickland.
The man who’d once towered over patients and doctors alike had shrunken. His scalp was a map of age spots, mottled with sparse gray hair.
He’d brought Stephen into the brotherhood, but his power had drained years earlier. He no longer attended meetings, but wasted the remaining years of his life being fawned over by his overbearing wife and grown children, all scrabbling for the inheritance he would leave in his wake.
“Have you ever watched ants, Dr. Kaiser?” Strickland hunched forward and seized a plastic box with his arthritic hands.
Stephen saw ants milling through the tiny channels encased in plastic.
“They kill their ill counterparts. They must, you see, in order to preserve the colony. If a diseased ant is allowed to spread his sickness, they all will die.” Strickland shook the plastic frame before returning it to his table.
He reached a shaky hand to a half-cigar resting in a gold flecked ash tray. He lit the cigar and blew a plume of foul-smelling smoke in Stephen’s direction.
Disgusted, Stephen waved the smoke away. The effort of breathing pained him, and he tried to hide his discomfort from the old man.
“Pity me, do you?” Strickland barked a laugh that betrayed his diseased lungs. “It is I who pities you, Stephen Kaiser. I’ve seen your secrets, after all.”
Strickland cackled and took another pull on his cigar before blotting it out in a crystal ashtray shaped like a feather.
Stephen glared at the doctor, refusing to speak. The man had no control over him anymore.
“You’ve got a woman locked in the attic of the women’s cottage,” Strickland huffed, leaning his head back against his reclining chair. “Get her out, and soon, or the brotherhood will dispose of her for you. And Stephen, do not doubt their swift justice. If they sense weakness in the colony, they will root it out and destroy it.”
Stephen brooded over the doctor’s words as he drove back to the asylum.
He parked and walked to the women’s cottage, nodding at nurses and orderlies, but grimly ignoring anyone who spoke to him.
His nurse, Alice, waited by the door, the medical supplies he’d requested clutched in her bony hands.
“Dr. Kaiser,” she said, tilting her head toward him.
“Alice,” he responded, gesturing to her as he took the stairs to the attic.
She struggled to keep up as he ascended. Alice was a large-boned woman with a penchant for sweets and a hard, almost hateful opinion of the patients at the Northern Michigan Asylum. She believed wholly in Dr. Kaiser’s work and never questioned his authority. She was the kind of nurse who took her doctor’s secrets to the grave.
Kaiser also suspected that Alice was in love with him, whatever strange series of emotions love included for a woman who spent her days filling her belly with chocolate and delighting in administering cold baths and electro-shock therapy to her patients.
Stephen peered through the grate to ensure that Liv slept before turning the key and pushing open the door.
Liv
Liv woke to find Stephen had bound her to the bed. Leather straps cut into the skin on her forearms and shins.
She dug her fingernails into the mattress and strained upward. The leather straps did not budge.
“You’ve really come into yourself, Liv. I keep marveling at how grown up you are,” Stephen said as he moved around her bed, smiling as if he’d popped in to visit an old friend.
“Stephen. What happened to George?”
The words tumbled out.
The night before, the question had rolled in her head like a marble caught in a sieve. And she didn’t need to ask the question. She knew. She’d known before she left Boston. She’d known the moment the little boy said the man in the hole. George had called her home because he was dead. The curse had come full circle. A life for a life.
Stephen shook his head.
“George? I haven’t seen him in ages.”
“Is that how you do it, Stephen? Block what you’ve done? Do you lock it in a trunk and throw away the key?”
Stephen stiffened, and the nurse, Alice, touched his arm tenderly.
Liv did not like the nurse. Her hands were cruel. She did not touch, but poked, and did so to cause pain.
“Livvy,” he started.
“Don’t call me that,” she snarled.
“Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
She laughed.
“And to think I wanted to protect you. I sacrificed everything for you, Stephen. Everything.”
Stephen shook his head sadly.
“I did hear about your mother, Liv. I was sorry to hear. Cancer, of all things. And she was hardly in a position to afford treatment.”
Liv’s stomach dropped, and her lungs seemed to deflate within her body.
“My mother?” she whispered.
Stephen widened his eyes in mock surprise.
“You didn’t know?” He slapped a palm against his forehead. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was callous of me.”
The fight seemed to drain from her body. She let her arms relax against the restraints. When the nurse held up a syringe and lightly depressed it, sending a squirt of clear liquid into the air, Liv concentrated on the needle.
“Sedate her, Doctor?”
“Yes.” Stephen put a hand on her forehead. “Poor dear needs a rest.” He turned his attention to Liv. “We’re transporting you today, Liv. You’ll get much better treatment once we’ve committed you.”
Chapter 31
Jesse
Jesse closed the closet door in Stephen Kaiser’s room, unwilling to look at the trunk as he searched the boy’s room.
He opened drawers, sifting through pants and socks. He peeked between books and flipped open their covers, searching for some evidence that might reveal who lay inside the trunk.
When he lifted the boy’s mattress, he spotted a faded leather folder.
He opened it, and a single page drifted out and landed on the floor.
At the top in bold cursive, he read: Curse of the Night Haunts.
Beneath the title, someone had written a series of materials including bat guano, valerian, two feathers from the tail of a hawk, a piece of birch bark, and an item belonging to the accursed.
Instructions followed:
The stave must be written in blood from the left thumb of the caster of the curse, on a night when the moon is between three-quarters and full. To draw the stave, the caster must dip the hawk’s feather into the blood, and print the symbol on the birch bark. Both feathers must be used. Dip the bloodied thumb in a mixture of the guano and valerian, and place three thumb prints beneath the stave. Wrap the stave with a personal item, which belongs to the accursed and contains their scent. The stave must be handed to the recipient from the castor’s left hand, the blood hand, and the gift must be accepted freely.
In the bottom corner of the paper, Jesse’s eyes flicked over a name, and he froze.
Veronica, it said in small, dark cursive.
He noted two different styles of handwriting. One was dark, deep cursive - the writing of an educated person. The writer seemed to press hard, leaving indents beneath his words.
The second set of writing was hardly legible. Big awkward letters with arrows and symbols. This was the person who knew the spell. They were offering deeper insights into how to perform it.