Laura Kasischke - The Raising

No.

He had to resign himself to getting back into Professor Blackhawk’s car, and starting it up, and driving it off.

But Perry had driven only a few blocks (past the Hollidays’—one of whose sons, the last Perry had heard, was a homeless violinist in Santa Monica—and around the corner on which Mrs. Samm lived with the children of her youngest daughter, who’d been killed in motorcycle accident) when he pulled to the curb again and turned off the engine:

A whole group of girls had been gathered around that organ, which Mr. Werner had been playing, and when they’d realized someone was stopping by, they’d fled.

It was a small house. Three bedrooms? Was the basement even finished? The kitchen was small enough, as he recalled it, to have been called a kitchenette. They had to have gone to the farthest bedroom. They had to have been holding their breaths. Had they sat at the edges of the bed, holding their fingers to their lips to remind themselves to stay silent?

Why?

It would have been crazy.

If they’d wanted to avoid him, all they’d have had to do was have Mrs. Werner say at the door, “We’re busy at the moment, Perry, or I’d invite you in—”

No.

They didn’t want him to know they were there.

Or was he the one who was crazy?

Perry got out of the car then and started to walk back to the Werners’.

Ted Dientz reminded Mira of a gym teacher she’d had, one of the few junior high teachers who’d seemed to really love his job, feel serious passion for his subject. Sometimes, even now, Mira thought of him while teaching one of her own classes, remembering the way he’d stood in front of a slide projection of an illustration of the muscles of the human body.

Rippling, himself, with muscles, Mr. Baker would point out the best ones, the ones that could be developed with “so little work you won’t even know you’re doing it.” The benefits of this, the beauty of weightlifting, sometimes seemed to overwhelm him as he tried to describe it. (“You won’t believe it. One day you won’t even be able to lift something, and in a short time, you won’t even feel like you’re lifting it.”) And although Mira had never become interested in weightlifting, she’d learned something about enthusiasm from Mr. Baker, and how a teacher can convey a sense of it to his students. It was Mr. Baker she’d thought of in her own freshman Latin class upon learning that the word enthusiasmus meant “inspired by a god.”

In the case of Ted Dientz, there was no doubt that it was the God of the Underworld who possessed him, but Mira understood as well as anyone what that was like. When he brought up the envelope with the bloodstain card from the basement, he said, “You know there’s very little that a few blood cells or a strand of hair can’t tell us any longer. You could be a master of disguise, but if I could compare a single one of your cells to a strand of your mother’s hair, I would instantly know who you are.”

He let Mira take the envelope from his hands, and said, “Go ahead. It’s in sealant. You can’t hurt it.”

Mira opened the envelope and slid out the card. It was a little bigger than a business card. The top half of it was white, and it had Nicole’s name and birth and death dates written on it in black capital letters, in a felt-tip pen. The bottom half was purple with a dime-size circle in the center, and in the center of that lay a dark and ragged little stain.

Ted Dientz tapped it and said, “That’s our girl.”

Mira looked at the little stain. Nicole, if it was Nicole.

“Everything there we need to know. Everything we’d need to bring her back to life, really, if we had just a bit more know-how. Well, someday!” He chuckled, and then he took the card from her, tucked it back into the envelope, and held it on his lap. It stayed there between them like a third person—not a ghost, exactly, just a presence—as they talked about Mira’s research, her book, her travels, and his travels.

Ted Dientz had, himself, as she had, visited Bran Castle in the Carpathian Mountains.

“Of course, my wife and I didn’t tell the folks around here that we were visiting Dracula’s castle. It would have looked bad for business.”

“So what did you tell them?” Mira asked, before realizing it might embarrass him, his lie.

“Well, we said we were on a mission trip. Orphanages and such.” (And indeed he blushed from his necktie to his forehead as he told her.) “But you can imagine my interest! As I can tell you understand, as so few people do, it’s not a morbid fascination; it’s a scientific one. I’m not interested in vampires, but I am interested in legends surrounding death. I have, myself, witnessed some extraordinary things.”

Mira nodded for him to go on, while resisting the urge to take out her notebook and pen.

“I’ve seen, for instance, corpses sit up and sound as if they were screaming. Of course, it’s biological. It’s utterly explainable. But let me tell you—” He laughed, and so did she. “And there have been bodies that seemed to withstand decay for strangely long periods of time, Professor. Others that disintegrated even as I moved them from their deathbed to a stretcher. And the differences have so little to do with age, with disease. Certainly, a more primitive people would have needed a way to explain this, along with other things, such as the sense one sometimes has of a presence. Sometimes malevolent. Sometimes desperate.”

“How do you explain it?” Mira asked.

“Well, I don’t,” Ted Dientz said a little sheepishly. “It might surprise you to know,” he added, raising his eyebrows, clearly hoping that it would, “that Mrs. Dientz and I traveled to Thailand after the tsunami and assisted in the preparation and disposal of bodies. The need for morticians and others in the death arts was extraordinary at that time. It was perhaps the most important work I’ve ever been able to offer.”

It did surprise Mira. It was easier to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Dientz of Bad Axe on a travel tour of Dracula’s castle than taking a plane to one of the most devastated places in the world.

Ted Dientz went on to tell Mira that during the weeks he’d spent in Thailand he’d met many people who believed they’d seen drowned corpses rise from the waters, walk onto shore, stride past horrified onlookers, and even hail cabs to be driven away.

“Did they think they were ghosts?” Mira asked.

“Some believed they were ghosts, yes. In fact, most cab drivers refused to make their rounds down by the beach in those early weeks, claiming they were being hailed by ghosts, or that they could see the dead tourists on the beach still looking for each other, or playing obliviously in the sea. One told me, ‘They think they’re still on vacation.’ But most people seemed to think these were actually reanimated corpses. It’s not an unusual belief, Professor, as you know. I have to tell you, you’d think a man like me, having spent his whole life in this business, would find that laughable, but I don’t.”

She nodded.

She felt her eyes welling stupidly with tears.

The simple honesty of this man, with her, a stranger. He had waited, she felt, a long time to tell someone other than Mrs. Dientz about all this. It meant something to him that she was nodding. He rested his hand patiently on the envelope containing the bloodstain card. He was a man made of patience, she thought.

Now she owed him her own story, she felt—or, she realized, too, that she needed to tell it, just as he’d needed to tell someone. So she started, the day she had stayed home from school, the vision of her mother in the pantry, the funeral years later, the strange and terrifying images that had inspired her entire life’s work. She had just finished speaking, and Mr. Dientz was nodding, quiet but fully attentive, when Perry came back through the door, out of breath, gasping for breath, holding the handle of a hairbrush wrapped in tissue and trailing a little white blizzard behind him.