Resurrection

by Curran, Tim

  Marcus looked over towards where Rose was and saw him pass behind a tree and that’s when he knew they’d made a terrible mistake. What they were doing was simply procedure. It’s what cops did. The powers that be were hot to find out what happened to those girls. Yet, even with that in mind and the knowledge that they were doing the right thing, he knew down deep that the right thing was not always the smartest thing. Because this was a trap. This girl was bait and she was drawing them in, perhaps as she had drawn the caretaker in.

  Marcus could not see Rose now.

  He’d disappeared behind some hedges. Too many stones out there and thick tree trunks.

  And that’s when Rose screamed.

  It was a quick, almost economical sort of scream that died away almost as soon as he’d heard it. The girl giggled and when he looked back at her, she was gone.

  “Dave!” he cried out. “Dave! Where the hell are you?”

  But there was no answer, of course.

  Marcus went running through the stones in the direction of that scream. He vaulted hedgerows and slabs, circled around trees, the rain and the ground mist obscuring everything. He wiped water from his eyes and then skidded to a stop over a collection of wet leaves.

  There was an open grave before him.

  Perfectly squared off, it reached down and down into the black earth. He could smell the dankness of it. There had to have been three or four feet of standing water in it, leaves floating on the surface.

  “Dave?” he said. “Dave?”

  This could have been what happened. Rose could have fallen, maybe hit his head, was lying down in there drowning right now. Marcus stood on the edge, looking down. He had never felt so helpless in his life. If Dave was down there…what then?

  You’re not really thinking of jumping in, are you?

  But, no, he wasn’t thinking that. That water was black and oily, full of leaves and God only knew what.

  He pulled his walkie-talkie off his belt. “Dispatch? This is Fifteen! Officer needs assistance! Repeat! Officer needs assistance! Hope Street Cemetery location…”

  There was nothing but a garbled static coming from the walkie-talkie.

  Marcus thumbed it. “Dispatch! Dispatch!”

  More static, rising and falling, then the voices of several little girls: “Eenie, meanie, miny, moe”

  Marcus felt suddenly hot and cold inside. His heart raced, his hand shook. “Clear this channel! Clear this channel!”

  “EENIE, MEANIE, MINY, MOE!” came the voices, loud, chanting. “CATCH A NIGGER BY THE TOE! IF HE HOLLERS, LET HIM GO—”

  “Clear this channel! Clear this fucking channel!”

  “MY MOTHER SAYS TO PICK THE VERY BEST ONE AND YOU—”

  “STOP IT!” Marcus shouted. “DO YOU HEAR ME? STOP IT!”

  “—ARE NOT IT!”

  Then more static and he could not get the radio to obey. Standing there, trembling and filled with a sharp, cutting silence, he knew that it was all in his head. It had to be in his head. He was hallucinating. He looked down into the grave and was not really surprised when he saw another white face emerge from the water, leaves clinging to it. Another little girl. This one blonde with eyes so black and liquid you could have drowned in them.

  Marcus turned away.

  That little girl was saying something, but he did not want to know what.

  There was only one thing to do and that was to head back to the patrol car and get the hell out of here, come back with reinforcements. That’s what had to be done. And although his mind was cluttered with crawling, nightmare things, he saw the truth of this and knew there was no other way. He ran around the hedges and almost fell into a pack of girls.

  Three of them, actually.

  All dressed in their Holy Covenant uniforms and all white-faced with leering eyes of translucent blackness. No pupils, no whites, just that solid blackness. They were all grinning at him, leaves and sticks stuck to them, streaks of dirt on their faces.

  “Dave said you should come with us, Pat,” they said in unison. “Dave said you should come so we can play a game together.”

  Marcus drew his 9mm pistol. “I know what you are,” he said, trying to get some breath into his lungs. “I know what all of you are. You better get out of my way. If you don’t think I’ll shoot things like you, you’re wrong.”

  The girls giggled.

  “Get out of my way!”

  “We want to play a game with you,” they said.

  Behind him, another voice said, “Pssst!”

  Marcus wheeled around. Another girl was peering at him from behind a tree. “You’re it!” she said.

  Then she disappeared.

  Marcus felt the madness open up inside him like a sucking pit that wanted to drown him, body and soul. You’re it? Sure, why not? Of course he was it. It was all a very fucked-up little kid’s game and he was it. Yes, yes, yes.

  The walkie-talkie in his left hand crackled and he jumped. “Dispatch!” he said into it, just waiting for those eerie little girl voices to come echoing out of it.

  But this time it was someone else: “Pat! Pat! Jesus Christ, help me! Help me!”

  In the distance, he heard Rose crying out.

  Then Marcus was running. He could hear the girls chasing behind him, wanting to tag him and do other things that his mind would not let him think about. He came out on the road just up from the caretaker’s shack. He saw a couple other girls dragging Rose’s body towards the yawning mouth of a tomb.

  “Dave!” he shouted. “Dave!”

  This has been arranged and you know it, don’t you, Pat? A trap, just a fucking trap!

  But he was done listening to stupid damn voices.

  Dave Rose was in trouble.

  And those little bitches were going to pay for it.

  Marcus ran, gun in one hand and walkie-talkie in the other. He’d had enough of this shit and he was going to take care of business now. Just watch him. Games? He’d show those little cunts some games they’d never, ever heard of. The tomb was cut from gray stone with lots of dead ivy clinging to it. The wrought iron gates were thrown wide. He marched through and saw a set of steps before him. He moved down them, determined and resolute…and promptly slipped and fell, plunging into the water. He came up gasping, the sound of splashing water echoing in the cavernous tomb. The stink in there of submerged dead things going to rot was almost unbearable.

  But he saw.

  He saw Dave Rose just as dead as dead could be floating in the water. He saw those Catholic schoolgirls standing in the murk, dripping and ghoulish and grinning. A few caskets had been pulled from their berths in the walls. What was in them was floating around. Black liquid running from their mouths, the living dead girls chewed on arms and legs and one coveted a skull with hardly any meat on it. She licked at the hollow eye sockets.

  “Very good girls,” a booming voice said from behind Marcus.

  He looked up and saw…saw a nun standing at the top of the steps. Her habit was filthy with mud and leaves, slit right open to the waist. Her breasts were huge and pendulant and white as cream, mottled with a stark grayness. And the truly, unbelievably insane part was that they had replicated themselves. There were not just two of those bloated, gray-nippled breasts, but four sets running down to her waist, swinging as she spoke.

  Yes, yes, yes, Marcus knew, a nun had disappeared with the girls and, Lord be praised, here she was…in the flesh.

  She came down the steps, her skirts flowing around her like sheets in a wind, her breasts swaying and slopping from side to side. She held her hands out and he could see the holes that had been punched through the palms as if by nails. Black juice ran from them. And her face…swollen and set with flies, was a lumpy mass of colorless flesh that seemed to be oozing like melting clay. Her eyes were huge and black and running with a clear jelly.

  “Patrick Marcus! The Day of Judgment is at hand and the horn will sound!” she said in a voice that was clotted and thick like somebody vomiting. Her
teeth were gunmetal gray and overlapping, terribly sharp as if they’d been filed. They gnashed together. “The fallen angels have gathered in our midst and set loose foul horrors which would eat the righteous body and soul! Oh, the evil that men do, Patrick, the evil that men do!”

  Marcus did the only thing he could do.

  He fired three rounds into her. One of which exploded one of those breasts, spraying rancid tissue into the water.

  Then he screamed.

  Above, the tomb door swung shut and there was splashing in the water as the girls inched closer. But in the steaming, foul darkness, he did not go mad. Not until the nun took his face in her hands and forced a cold tongue into his mouth. One that was slimy and cold like a river leech. This is what destroyed his mind.

  That and the sounds of the girl suckling those fleshy, distended breasts.

  22

  Some days just go from bad to worse.

  Maybe for awhile they tease you a bit with false hopes or promises, but in the end they invariably head in the same direction: they find the biggest, darkest hole available and they drag you in with them.

  That’s pretty much how it was for Mitch.

  He wasn’t so much worried about the shit hitting the fan, being that it already had and he was covered from head to toe. No, he was worried that it wouldn’t stop hitting said fan, that he’d never be able to quit bobbing and weaving. What he’d been through over at Sadler Brother’s Army/Navy Surplus was unquestionably bad. The sort of experience that took your mind and shook it up like a snow globe. Ditto for the dead woman in the drainpipe. But what Tommy and he had gone through over at the Bell house…that was worse. That was ugly and just plain disturbing. There was no doubt that one of those things had been in the house with them—after they were driving away, Tommy had reiterated that it had indeed been a girl he’d seen in the mirror, maybe nine or ten, but as much like a nine or ten year old girl as an A-bomb was like a firecracker—and she had been dogging them, watching them, playing games with them much as any naughty girl might do.

  Of course, she was not just a good girl gone bad. She was something dead that walked, but somehow and for some reason they would never know, what she had put them through was probably some debased form of play for her.

  At least, that’s what Mitch was thinking. Playing with us, happily fucking with our heads. Maybe getting off on the fear she generated. And if we had hung around long enough, she would have declared herself the winner and tore out our throats.

  Maybe he was just overwrought, but then maybe not.

  When they reached Lisa Sale’s house over in Elmwood Hills, taking their time so they wouldn’t show up at the door pale and trembling, Lisa’s mom and dad and younger sister were all there. The bad news was that Chrissy and the others were not. The good news was that they had been. That afternoon, maybe about the same time Mitch was watching a dead arm flopping on the floor of Sadler Brother’s, Heather and Lisa and Chrissy had returned. Loaded down from shopping at the West Town Mall, they had played a little Xbox and tried on some new outfits, then they were off again.

  Mitch told Mike Sale, Heather’s father, to keep them there when they returned. To hold them at gunpoint if necessary. Mike said he would be glad to. Of course, Mitch could see the look in his eyes, the what’s-the-big-deal? sort of look. So, revving up the old bullshit machine to 75 rpm’s, he explained that Lily was freaking out (she was) and that there was something of a family crisis. Mike Sale bought that okay, though Mitch could see that he wasn’t buying it completely.

  After that, there was nothing to do but head back to Crandon and Lily.

  That was the plan anyway, but then Tommy said, “Mitch? You mind if we take a quick stop by Bonnie’s place?”

  Bonnie Kohler was Tommy’s only family in the world. His parents were long dead and his brother had gotten killed in a head-on collision out on Highway 8 six years before. Bonnie was his step-sister. Tommy saw her maybe once or twice a year, but with what was going on, you started thinking more about family. Those slim threads that held you together suddenly started feeling very weighty and necessary.

  “Okay with me,” Mitch said.

  Bonnie had a store at the very outskirts of Elmwood as it sloped down towards Bethany and the river. Tommy got them there in about five minutes and the further they went, the deeper the water became. Those last few blocks were marked by cars stalled at curbsides and lots of empty-looking storefronts. Even the bars that never closed looked deserted. By the time they got to Bonnie’s One-Stop—package liquor, cold beer, and broasted chicken—the water was over a foot deep in the street. They could see Bethany hugging the river in the distance, water sluicing right up to windowsills.

  But at least they found all the people.

  They were gathered outside Bonnie’s little neighborhood store which sat between a couple little shops, Antiques of Yesteryear and Fern’s Fancy Gifts—Discount Moccasins and Ojibwa Bead Supplies. The sort of places that Mitch’s father had always called “bucket shops” with some derision.

  “What the hell is that all about?” Tommy said, maybe louder than he intended, eyeing the crowd outside Bonnie’s.

  Mitch wasn’t sure, but it didn’t look good, though, not good at all.

  People generally didn’t gather like that unless there was an accident, a fire, or some guy was handing out money. You could have just won ten million in the lottery or cured cancer, but that wouldn’t have brought them out like something particularly bad. Something involving blood and bodies or hardship. Then you couldn’t get rid of them. They flocked like seagulls when somebody dropped a French fry.

  Tommy and Mitch hopped out of the cab into the chill standing water which looked gray and filthy like seepage from a cesspool. Mitch could just about imagine what might be floating in it. When the rainwater gravity drains backed up for any length of time, they also flooded out the sewer systems and the result was sewage in the streets.

  Mitch raced behind Tommy to the store. There were maybe twenty or thirty people standing out there in raincoats and rubber boots as the rain continued to fall and the water continued to rise. There was something terribly ludicrous about it all. And Mitch knew that whatever was going on had to be good.

  “What’s going on here?” Tommy asked an old guy who had a baseball bat in his hands, of all things.

  “We’re waiting for the cops and they’re about as quick as fucking molasses like usual,” the guy said. He pointed towards the store entrance with his bat. “Something’s going on in there. Something bad. You better stay out here with us, mister.”

  There were cords standing out in Tommy’s neck now. “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “Cool your jets, hotshot,” the old guy said.

  Which was about as much mouth as Tommy had patience for. He grabbed the old guy by the coat and nearly hoisted him right off his feet. “That’s my sister’s fucking store…you hear me? Now tell me what’s going on in there.”

  The others were all watching now. Maybe they would have come to the old guy’s aid, but not after what Tommy had said. He had just made it personal.

  “Take it easy,” a woman said. “There’s some crazy woman hiding in there.”

  Tommy released the old man. “Is it…is it Bonnie?”

  The woman shook her head. “No, Bonnie’s in Chicago. But she ain’t gonna like it much when she gets back, I’ll tell you that much.”

  At this point, Mitch interceded before Tommy started getting really pissed off. It came from about six or seven people, but he finally got the basics. Some crazy bitch came out of the cellar trapdoor and attacked the girl behind the counter. When somebody went in to help, the crazy lady attacked them, too. Both of them managed to get out and now they were on their way over to St. Mary’s Hospital.

  “But don’t go in there,” a teenage kid said. “I saw her…she was outta her head.”

  “How did she look?” Mitch asked.

  The kid looked like he didn’t want to say. Finally,
he shrugged. “Just sort of funny…like she’d been in an accident or something. She’s got a gray veil covering her face. Weird, you know? Like she came from a funeral or something.”

  Mitch swallowed. I’m willing to bet she did, son. Her own.

  There were several others who’d apparently seen her and they just nodded. Together, they were brave enough to stand guard—at a healthy distance from the entrance—but that didn’t mean they were brave enough to actually go in there.

  Tommy left and came right back with his four-ten.

  “I’m telling you,” the guy said again, “you don’t want to go in there.”

  Tommy breezed right past him and Mitch followed. The old guy handed over his baseball bat to him, so at least he had something. They went up the short flight of steps and in. Inside, it smelled like a distillery. A series of tight aisles ran through the store, shelves packed high with everything from canned soup to toilet paper to potato chips. Anywhere there was some free space, cases of beer were stacked in displays. Or at least, that’s how the store had appeared before the crazy lady went on her binge. Now everything was spilled all over the place. Snacks and candy carpeting the floors were dusted down by burst bags of flour and sugar. Racks of hard liquor had been tipped over and there was shattered glass everywhere, the stink of gin and whiskey enough to curl your nostril hairs. A lifesize cardboard stand-up of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was splattered with what might have been catsup or taco sauce.

  It was dim and shadowy in there and with the wreckage, there were dozens of places to hide.

  “Guess we better take a look-see,” Tommy muttered.

  He kicked aside a few cans of beer that went rolling on the old warped hardwood floor and then rolled right back. Behind the counter, the shelves had been cleared of cartons of cigarettes and tins of cigars. There was an avalanche of them back there. Tommy waded through, popping the drawer on the cash register. The money in there was untouched.