J. R. Erickson
Some Can See
Prologue
August 18, 1935
Sophia
Sophia lifted the rock, hoping for a salamander. She kicked the black dirt crawling with ants and moved onto a downed tree branch. The previous summer she and her friend Ellen had found half a dozen salamanders at least. This summer Ellen didn’t want to play in the woods. She wanted to go into town with her mama and gaze in the store windows at the new dresses on display. Or she liked to stay home and practice French braiding her hair.
“We’re thirteen now,” Ellen had said to Sophia half a dozen times at least - as if that explained why she wanted to sew a new dress instead of swim in the pond.
Sophia yawned just thinking about it.
Sophia had asked her brother Grimmel to join her, but he preferred to play in the cow pasture with the neighbor boys. Plus, Mama had given him new chores since Daddy died and he hardly had time to play with his friends let alone his little sister. Sophia too had new chores. She mucked the stables and fed the chickens every morning.
That day, rather than fill the wood box, she’d streaked for the woods praying mama didn’t spot her through the kitchen window.
A branch snapped nearby, and Sophia tucked behind a tree searching for a wandering deer. Sophia liked to lie in the downed grass where the deer nested at night. Their beds were soft and matted and she could almost imagine wrapping her body around a little fawn and stroking his knobby spine. She crept further, listening for another sound, but heard nothing.
Giving up her search, she scanned the ground for more rocks. Her daddy had told her that salamanders like dark, damp places and rocks were their perfect hideouts.
“Sophia…” she heard her name and glanced up to find Rosemary on the deer path in front of her.
Rosemary wore a pretty yellow dress streaked in mud and dark stains. Her mama would have her hide for that. Her dark curls, usually neatly arranged on her head, hung loose and wild. She watched Sophia with big empty eyes.
“Rosemary?” Sophia asked, feeling a trickle of fear light along her spine for Lord knows why. She surely wasn’t afraid of Rosemary. “Your mama is lookin’ all over for you. The sheriff came by our house. You better run home fast. Maybe stop at the pond and wipe off your dress.”
Rosemary didn’t speak or even blink. Something wasn’t right with her eyes. As Sophia stared at her, she noticed other wrong things. A trickle of blood hovered just beneath Rosemary’s nose and her arm seemed bent at a weird angle, like it had been broken, and now hung in a sack of skin.
Sophia wanted to take a step back, but instead she walked forward, lifting a hand.
“Are you hurt, Rosemary?”
Rosemary nodded and turned back the way she’d come. She didn’t speak but walked further into the forest. She moved in a jerky limp that should have sent the girl sprawling, but somehow didn’t. They came to Earl’s cabin, an old hunting shack abandoned for years since the old man who lived there died in his sleep. It was only four walls with a dirt floor and a few holes for windows. Rosemary stopped at the door.
Sophia stared at it, knowing Rosemary wanted her to look inside the cabin, but her feet had grown roots and she couldn’t move a muscle. The hot day grew hotter. She sleeved a sheen of sweat off her upper lip and turned back the way they’d come thinking for the first time she should run for help.
Rosemary hitched forward into the cabin. The door creaked on a rusted hinge. Sophia stepped in behind her leaving the glare of sunlight for the stifling darkness of the cabin. It smelled like the barn after daddy had slaughtered a pig. Sophia wrinkled her nose and stuffed her t-shirt up over her face. The door had swung closed, and she couldn’t see. Her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the dark and the windows offered little light. Something lay on the floor in the center of the cabin. Sophia blinked down. Where had Rosemary gone?
Sophia stepped to the door and kicked it open. It clattered against the side of the cabin making her jump. Turning back, she looked at the cabin floor trying to understand what lay there. It had been covered with an itchy looking blanket, and next to the mound lay a knife with a bone handle. Sophia bent down and picked the knife up with one hand while pulling the blanket back with the other.
Her breath caught hard in her chest as she stared at the body of Rosemary Bell. The girl lay in a pool of spreading darkness. Her face was tilted toward the door and Sophia saw her wide eyes staring vacant, the whites red and veiny. Her mouth hung open and blood trickled from her nose.
Sophia stumbled back, clutching the knife tight in her hand. When a crow called in the forest, Sophia whirled around and leapt from the cabin running hard, pausing only when she remembered that Rosemary had taken her to the cabin. How? But she didn’t stop to consider. Jumping over logs and tearing through raspberry bushes that pricked her bare legs, she raced for home.
Only when her feet met the edge of her families’ property, thick with black-eyed Susan’s, did she slow and catch her breath. Gasping, she hurried for the house walking first into the barn and calling out for Timmy. She still clutched the knife, and she threw it hard on the floor before running to the house.
Her mama stood at the kitchen sink, elbow deep in a basin of sudsy water.
“Mama… mama,” she whispered, pushing through the screen door and shaking her head back and forth as if she might clear the vision of Rosemary slumped on the floor.
“Sophia Ann Gray, if you are tracking dirt into this kitchen, I’ll…” but her mama didn’t finish the sentence. She whipped her hands from the sink, dried them on a cloth, and strode to her daughter, grabbing Sophia’s shoulders and bending low to look into her face. “What’s happened?”
Sophia looked at her hand and wondered at the dark red streaks there. Had she cut herself on the knife? But no, it was Rosemary’s blood she stared at.
“Are you hurt?” Sophia’s mother took her hand and gently turned it over.
Sophia shook her head.
“Not me, Mama. Rosemary. I found her…”
Sophia’s mama frowned, her eyes moving from Sophia’s face back to her bloody hand.
“She’s hurt? Where is she?” Her mother straightened up, yanked off her apron and slipped into her shoes. She pulled open the door and grabbed Sophia’s hand smearing the blood onto her own.
Sophia pulled back, holding her ground, afraid to return to the woods and the cabin and…
“Sophia, snap out of it. This is not time for one of your daydreams. If Rosemary Bell is injured-”
But Sophia didn’t let her finish.
“She’s dead, mama. Rosemary is dead.”
Twenty Years Later
1955
The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane
Doctor Kaiser held the framed photograph in his hand. His mother had been beautiful and terrible like a witch from a fairy tale who appeared golden and glowing until you saw her reflection in the mirror. Then you’d see her molten skin and flashing red eyes, her hands like claws reaching out for you when you turned your back.
He put the photograph in his desk, locked the drawer and stood.
He wound through the asylum’s administrative floor, nodding at the doctors and nurses, avoiding the small talk. The intolerable Dr. Moore tried to catch his eye, and he turned taking an alternate route, descending a set of stairs to the patient transport tunnels.