Resurrection Man

by Sean Stewart

  Something in Aunt Sophie's black wool coat ground into his hip. Blinking, he reached down into one of her pockets and brought up a handful of stones. Dante gazed stupidly at them. Why would Aunt Sophie have filled her pockets with stones? When he finally looked up, he found Jet watching him, dark eyes narrow and thoughtful.

  Dante thought, This means something to him.

  But nothing that wasn't sleep had a hold on Dante now. He put the rocks back where he had found them and stumbled up the stairs to bed. His head hit the pillow and he was falling.

  Tumbling from consciousness to a deep and dreamless place, he passed himself, still trapped in Jewel's study.

  The study was bare of butterflies this time. Jewel sat behind her desk, dressed in her white blouse and gray wool skirt. There were three other places to sit in her study: a comfortable brown armchair, a hard oak chair beside the escritoire, and a little pine stool in front of the grim doll's house. Dante started to sit in the armchair—

  Murder!

  —then stopped as dread wailed through him. His heart hammered and his mouth went dry. Very slowly he stood up again, and slowly he took a seat in the hard oak chair by the escritoire. It was implacable, but at least not webbed with horror. He looked at the sinister brown armchair and shuddered.

  It's a test, Jewel said. I can tell a lot about a person from where he chooses to sit.

  "Whether he's an angel."

  Jewel shrugged. And other things. There are angels who would sit in that chair, knowing what you know.

  "Would you?"

  I have my own chair, Jewel said, throned in the high-back Victorian monster at her desk. Behind her, a tall bookcase rose high above her shadowed face.

  "But if you were someone else. If you were a visitor, and felt all this as a visitor would feel it. Would you sit in the armchair, just to show off, or would you sit where I'm sitting, to project all your will and steel and determination? Or would you perch on the stool and play with the dolls?"

  Seriously?

  Dante nodded.

  Seriously, Jewel said, I would do anything in my power to keep from ever coming in the door.

  As Dante watched, a pair of jeweled wings, indescribably beautiful, fluttered at her throat. A butterfly crawled out from beneath her blouse. I am a very deadly angel, Jewel murmured. A second butterfly followed the first. Then a third tumbled from her graying hair and crawled down her shoulder. You don't have any children, do you? she said sharply.

  "No," Dante whispered.

  Jewel shook her head, and another butterfly fell out. It's my one rule, she said firmly. Risk what you like on your own time, fine, but don't screw around with children's lives. I won't let an angel come down my stairs until I know he doesn't have children, usually; but today I'm so . . . Her words trailed off; confusion filmed her eyes like cataracts.

  "No kids," Dante whispered.

  Slowly Jewel nodded, extending her arm. Then give me your hand, she murmured. Give me your hand, and I'll press your fingers onto God.

  Like Jet, Dante thought. Pressing his secrets on me. But he was too far in to back out now. He was trapped, and running out of time.

  He held out his hand.

  WHEN IS DEATH NOT WITHIN OURSELVES? ...LIVING AND DEAD ARE THE SAME, AND SO ARE AWAKE AND ASLEEP, YOUNG AND OLD. —HERACLITUS

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  Portrait

  By some universal law, never formally codified but nonetheless immutable as gravity, every album must contain a picture of a pet.

  My pet is a colony of rust. I keep it in a glass jar above the radiator; if properly watered, the heat aids its digestion. I used an old nail as a nurse log and stripped the paper from supermarket twist-ties to make saplings. Once each week I try to feed it something nice, a couple of staples if I'm feeling benevolent; a paper clip, coppery and difficult to digest, if my mood is harsh. On Father's Day I give it a thumbtack, and at Christmas it gets the lid from a tin can; each Thanksgiving I drop in a whole ball of steel wool.

  I suppose there's a moral in rust, somewhere. Our bodies decay, attacked from the inside by our own free radicals. Our minds are crumbling too, as the magic rises. I read in the Sunday Times that the number of schizophrenics in the population has doubled in the last ten years, and is expected to double again in the next five. Rot is spreading out from the hearts of our great cities. We live in a world of slow corrosion, and we are all of us rusting from the inside out.

  There's a moral in just about everything, if you care to look for it. I usually do—perhaps too often. Maybe it's enough to say I like my little colony. Even though it's not alive, it grows: an example to us all! It pleases my humor. And this picture is in color, for once, because rust is such a lovely shade of red.

  * * *

  Early next morning Sarah burst in on Dante with Jet hard on her heels. She flung the curtains wide, flooding Dante's room with pale autumn light.

  Dante blinked. "Sis?" Still dreamy and confused, he was reassured by the ordinariness of his room and the day beyond his window.

  Fragments of dream scuttled like cockroaches into the dark corners of his mind.

  He was glad to be awake.

  "This has to stop," Sarah hissed, her face white with strain and sleeplessness.

  "It's not all Dante's fault," Jet said. "For once."

  "You stay out of this!" Sarah cried. "You just want to find your soul or your father or whatever the hell it is you think you've lost. You don't give a damn what happens to the rest of us."

  Dante struggled to sit up in bed. Good grief. He had slept in his clothes for the first time since he was twelve years old. His linen shirt was distressingly wrinkled and one of his cuff links had worked its way free. He rooted in the bedclothes until he found it. "What has to stop?"

  "You! Whatever angel thing you're doing that's bringing up these ghosts!"

  Dante rubbed his eyes, then ran a hand up over his satanic eyebrows and his balding forehead. "What angel thing is that, exactly?"

  Jet cackled. "It seems you're a regular Pandora's box, Dante. Ever since we opened you up on Friday night, all sorts of ghastly things have come flying out."

  A jolt of adrenaline washed through Dante's blood like ice water, leaving him painfully awake. "Pendleton's hat," he murmured. Jet looked at him, one black eyebrow quirking. "On a peg downstairs," Dante explained. "I saw it when we came in last night, but I was too tired to think straight. It must be more than thirty years old. Did anyone else see it?"

  Jet was already out the door. He returned a few seconds later. "It's there all right. Hanging at the end, an expensive satin-lined fedora that was never there before."

  "God. I hope Aunt Sophie doesn't see it," Sarah murmured. "Not on top of his ring."

  "I think she already has," Dante murmured. Horror crept through him, remembering the pockets of her black wool coat, heavy with stones.

  How close had Aunt Sophie come to walking under the river, to a dark place where her old wounds couldn't hurt her anymore?

  That's how Pendleton had gone too, wasn't it? Threw himself in the river when he saw the diamondback butterfly on Jet's baby cheek and knew that he had lost the soul of his firstborn son in a game of cards.

  Sarah dropped heavily onto Dante's bed. "You mean you didn't even know what you were doing with this angel stuff?"

  Dante smiled weakly. "Big surprise, hunh?"

  "Well, could we get you exorcised or analyzed or dry-cleaned or something? Because I'm being haunted now, and I'm not enjoying it very much."

  Oh great, Dante thought. Another way to bring a little extra grief down on his family. "Do you want to talk about it?"

  "Not particularly," she said crisply. "What I want is to know what we're supposed to do next."

  "There is one other ghost," Dante said carefully, trying to make sense of what was going on inside himself. Memories had been flooding back to him since the autopsy. But now, having taken the fateful step into Jewel's room, he was beginning to feel the f
uture too, growing like a cancer inside the body of the present. "Jewel got inside me last night," he said, looking to Jet. "When we were in her rooms at the angels' club."

  "Christ." Jet touched the butterfly on his cheek.

  "Maybe I raised her ghost, like when I pulled Pendleton up inside myself. Jewel is inside me now. Not just when I concentrate, but all the time. Inside me like a parasite."

  "Or a cyst."

  Reluctantly Dante nodded. Maybe it was Jewel crouching in that pulpy white sac inside his abdomen: Jewel like a spider with her brood, waiting to hatch.

  * * *

  Jewel knelt beside him (under his skin, below the muscles of his stomach, inside the secret meat at his core) as together they looked at the doll's house. Gently, very gently, Jewel cracked the house open to show Dante to himself, curled up in the parlor at the foot of Grandfather Clock.

  The memory cut into him like a scalpel, slicing cleanly through his skin, sinking in just above his third year.

  Tick. Tock. Tick. Carpet smells: dust and ash from ancient cigarettes. The nap rough against his cheek.

  Grandfather Clock divides time as well as space. Each tick shaves a second off your life. Tick. And one day, Mother will die. Tock. And Father will die. Tick. Aunt Sophie will die. Tock. Jet will die. Tick.

  I will die.

  Tock.

  I will die.

  Tick.

  He was three years old. He slapped the carpet, and watched the dust motes dance in a bar of sunshine.

  Death filled him up and overflowed him. He couldn't grasp it, only feel it overwhelm him, huge and vaporous and terrible.

  Tock.

  Three years old, he lay with his head on the carpet, already dying, watching the dust motes drift in the bar of sunshine and fall back into shadow.

  Light and darkness.

  Drift and fall.

  Tick.

  * * *

  You begin to suspect what you already know. Jewel's fingers tensed, tight as wire around his own. I'll make an angel of you yet.

  "Could Jewel be the one raising the ghosts?" Sarah asked.

  Dante frowned. "I don't think so," he said slowly. "Jewel's specialty was Sendings. It's close, but not the same thing. She would fix on an image, a personality or an archetype maybe, and brood over it until it hatched into life. But those were things that existed in the twilight world."

  "In the collective unconscious," Jet suggested.

  "Right! Right. But this other thing. . . this raising the ghosts of actual people: I think that's me, somehow. There's some kind of, of field or something."

  "The Lazarus Effect," Sarah intoned. "Great. Now we're trapped in an episode of The Twilight Zone."

  "But what about Pendleton?" Jet said. "What about me?"

  "Pendleton lost you to a Sending," Dante muttered, struggling to remember a memory that didn't belong to him. It was like trying to read small print in dim light while wearing glasses in the wrong prescription. "Jewel called him Albert, but his real name was Confidence. Jewel looked at Pendleton, and what she saw there—the hustler, the operator—was the germ of her Sending. But of course Confidence wasn't human: he was quick and sly and ruthless as Pendleton could never be."

  Dante looked up, blinking. "He was an operator in the city for a time, but something changed. Last Jewel knew he was selling books out of a little shop on the east side called Bargain Books."

  Jet fetched a copy of the Yellow Pages. He gave a queer little laugh. "Bargain Books: Let Us Cut a Deal for You." Jet copied down the address and then slowly closed the book. "Maybe I'll pay him a visit, sometime soon."

  Dante felt weak relief wash through him. Almost done, thank God. He had almost done his duty to Jet. Lord, he was so tired. Maybe the growth inside him was stealing all his energy, as a fetus robs nutrients from its mother's body. Steady on, he told himself. It's almost over. "Do you want me along?"

  Jet shook his head. "You've done everything I could have asked," he said slowly. "If I had known what it might cost you, I would never have started."

  "You did know," Dante snapped impatiently. He remembered the press of his own ribs in his back as they wrestled in the grave on Three Hawk Island. The taste of dirt in his mouth, the taste of his own death. "You knew what was under the blanket, damn it. It's too late to say you're sorry now."

  "Maybe." Jet closed his dark eyes. "But I am, Dante. I am sorry."

  Dante felt Sarah's hand on his shoulder. "It will be okay," she said, hugging him. She sniffed and smiled. "Sorry I've been such a crybaby. But it will work out, D." She gave his shoulder another squeeze. "It will all be okay, somehow."

  "Thanks," he said.

  * * *

  Sarah left, but at a look from Dante, Jet stayed. Dante sat on his bed, pulling on a fresh shirt and looking out his window. The last brittle leaves trembled on the poplars in the back yard. Farther on, the garden lay barren, blasted by an early frost. Farther still, the dark river. He had watched it all his life, running endlessly before his eyes and down the valley, into the shadows and beyond his sight, ending up God knew where. In the ocean, he supposed. Lost in the black immensity of the Atlantic.

  "Why are we afraid of death?" he asked.

  Jet scratched his jaw. "Seems like a reasonable thing to be afraid of."

  "I mean, when you're up high you're afraid of falling. When you see a needle you're afraid of the pain. It's not like that with death though, is it?"

  ". . .No. I guess it isn't," said Jet. Jet always understood what Dante meant.

  "It's not a matter of consequences," Dante said, frowning. "It just is. The one certain thing, stuck right in the middle of you, like your heart. The one thing you know. You fear it like, like. . ."

  "Like you're supposed to fear God."

  Dante nodded. From a lacquered box on his dresser he selected a new pair of cuff links, gold set with chips of polished jade. "It's the one thing," he said at last, watching the river. Smooth and dark, flowing out of sight, down to the ocean at last. "The only thing."

  * * *

  The one thing Dante knew he must do was talk to his father. He put it off—as he always put off everything unpleasant, he thought sourly to himself. In a fit of self- contempt he forced himself downstairs, only to find that Father was out delivering liniment for Jess Belton's rheumatism and a charm for Julie Gregson's little girl. Mother was taking advantage of the Thanksgiving Day sales to round up a good turkey, and Sarah had gone into the city. Only Aunt Sophie was left, puttering about the kitchen making one of her special cakes; the counters were cluttered with eggs and lemons and tubs of sour cream.

  Frustrated and relieved at once, Dante slunk back upstairs. A bath: that's what he wanted. To loll in a big warm tub like an eight-year-old again.

  Oops, he thought, running the water. Should have phoned the lab and left a message on the answering machine. Sorry—shan't be in again. About to die, don't you know. Cheerio. Oh, well; they'd figure it out soon enough.

  Gratefully he lowered himself into the wonderfully hot water. Tense from days of near-panic, his muscles ached and sulked, particularly in his back and shoulders, but as the bath water closed over his chest he felt his whole body sigh with pleasure. He touched himself lightly on the abdomen, like a physician checking for appendicitis. He was almost sure he could feel a bulge.

  Dante slid slowly under the water, letting it close over his face, blowing a stream of bubbles through his nose. It was wonderfully relaxing, warm as blood.

  Three more days, he thought.

  A butterfly tumbled from the hot water tap.

  "Christ!" Dante swore, watching it heave and swamp, its crumpling wings quickly sodden. "Jesus, Jewel. Can't you do something less disgusting?"

  An angel isn't a power, but a conduit for power. If what's inside you is a rose, you bring the rose forth. If it's a tumor, the tumor grows.

  Dante fumbled for the soap. "Your definition makes angels sound a lot like loonies," he observed. "My sister tells a joke about that. 'Re
member the Son of Sam?' she says. 'Killed twelve people because he said his dog told him to?—I mean, what kind of stupid reason is that? If your dog tells you to blow someone away with a .45 calibre handgun, what do you say? "BAD DOGGIE!"

  Jewel laughed. Good joke.

  Making a face, Dante scooped up the dead butterfly on the back of a shampoo bottle. Leaning out of the tub, he shook it off into the toilet.

  Jewel said, Why three days?

  "I made a bargain when we did the autopsy. One week to set things straight."

  Made a bargain with whom?

  "Just—just a bargain," Dante said, annoyed.

  With yourself. You made a bargain with yourself.

  "What if I did?"

  You're the one who thinks you're going to die. You're the one waiting for it.

  "So how did you die?" he asked moodily.

  —I don't want to talk about that.

  "Was it one of your Sendings? I bet it was. Just couldn't lay off, could you? What was it? A Sending of Nemesis, I bet."

  Not a Sending.

  Something quite different from Dante shuddered deep within his body.

  "You should have let it lie, whatever it was."

  Yes.

  But free will is for humans, not angels. An angel's greatness is giving way to Greatness. The greater the angel, the less freedom she has. The more she is constrained by the powers around her.

  The light went dim in Jewel's study (deep inside him). No longer sitting composedly behind the desk, Jewel walked nervously around her chamber, running her fingers over the back of a favorite book or touching, lightly, a certain mask, as if searching for the reassurance of familiar things. A wizard tries to control magic, she said. An angel is its channel, its riverbed. She turned on him. It's not just human dreams—get it? Not just our fancies, our whimsies. It's real. That's what you figure out, she murmured. And— (with difficulty) and the things we see there are real.

  "Like the Sendings."

  She shook her head. Only partly. Sendings need us. We find them, we bring them into the light. But there are other things too. . . . Chu never touched them. Aster and her crew never looked. They didn't dare, even when I told them. They couldn't bear to hold their eyes open. But last year for the first time I touched something that could walk into the world of its own accord, and walk back again.