Tim Curran - Resurrection

“What does this flesh tell you, Tommy Kastle?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Not much.”

“But you see the bumps on the skin?”

“Sure, all chickens have bumpy skin.”

Mitch just nodded. Chickens were bumpy. Once you plucked the feathers away, their flesh was yellow and oddly reptilian to the eye and to the touch.

“Sure, bumps!” Wanda said. “But if you look closely and you know what to see, those bumps form patterns that you can read! Yes they do…”

Her chicken was obviously not from a store. It was headless and plucked, but it still had its guts. Wanda produced a knife and slit it open. Then expertly she slit free gizzard and loops of bowel, examining them carefully. Holding the heart and liver in her palm, squeezing pockets of yellow fat in her fingertips. When she had cleaned out the cavity, she sorted through the cold meat and dropped organs into pans of water, watching the grease settle and coagulate.

“Hocus pocus, you think, Mitch?” she said. “Worse than reading egg yolks? Maybe, maybe. But divination is age-old and trusted. In the Bible, did not the Witch of Endor call up the ghost of dead Samuel via necromancy for Saul? And did not the dreams of Jacob serve the Pharaoh? And did not Jesus himself foresee his own crucifixion and resurrection? And what of the prophets of Israel and their grave warnings? The Greek oracles? King Oedipus and Delphi, the plagues of Thebes? Cicero and Plato and Plutarch? To divine is to be of God and it is as old as the bones of all men.”

Mitch didn’t know what she was talking about exactly.

He hadn’t picked up a Bible since Sunday School and the Greek philosophers just weren’t his thing and never had been. But he listened and accepted, knowing that time and age meant very little to this woman, for she was blessed with something timeless and ageless. She dipped her hands into the greasy, gutty water, balancing intestines in her hands, but not speaking. You could almost sense spirits congregating around her, deathless shades tearing through webs of mold and slipping from ancient tombs to be at her side. There was a vitality and an energy around her and inside her, it kissed that sallow old skin with a blush of pink and her eyes sparkled like sapphires. There was a smell of cold meat in the air, spices and herbs, flaking cerements and blood dried to sand. There was a sweetness and a bitterness, and just beneath it, a foulness as of riven crypts.

The spit in Mitch’s mouth had dried to a film now, for he was smelling things and sensing things, feeling things unseen rustling around him. And then he saw something that he would never have believed if somebody had told him about it.

Tommy saw it, too, said simply, “Shit…”

It was like the other incident where Wanda read those egg yolks, only worse. She had stiffened up, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. She trembled and made a moaning sound deep in her throat. There was a faint hissing sound as of steam and the air stirred around her, her hair blowing about, her dress flapping. And that’s when they saw it…white gossamer filaments coming from her fingertips and mouth and eyes. They grew and curled in the air, knotted and bunched, seeking each other out and joining in a wiry cage that encircled her head. The filaments looked physical, had substance like maybe you could hold them in your hands. But at the same time they seemed ethereal and appeared slightly transparent as if they were made of mist or cigarette smoke. They moved and pulsed, swimming and sliding like cobras in water.

Ectoplasm, Mitch heard a voice in his head say. That’s ectoplasm, ghost-threads.

And then as soon as they had appeared, they faded and were gone.

Wanda’s eyes focused and she looked at Mitch and Tommy. Those eyes were blazing and filled with a weird cerulean light. “No, not shit, Tommy Kastle. But the all and the everything. The talent and the gift that has come down my bloodline to me. The ability is in my blood and in my soul. I was taught by my mother as she was taught by hers down countless generations of women. That is how I know as we’ve always known, how I can see when you are blind…”

Wanda went off on another monologue about good luck and bad, about signs and portents and what was written on the wind and carried by the ashes of hearths. She told them that the caw of a raven brings death and disease and two crows circling a house means marriage and birth. Pigeons clustered on a roof are waiting to capture the soul of someone who will soon die and the whippoorwill calling in the dead of night is an indication that malign forces are gathering. The gentle hum of July bees brings good tidings, but the buzz of August wasps and hornets bring evil to the listener. Spiders are sacred to the memory of Athene and must never be killed, chortling frogs foretell passion, just as a gathering of vermin indicate pestilence and cattle sickening in the spring always foreshadow abnormal births or malignant growths to those who own them.

Finally, Mitch said, “Did you…did you see Chrissy?”

Wanda sat down, plucking a cigarette from Tommy’s pack. She snapped off the filter and lit it with a candle. She looked very tired and very old as if the process had taken years from her. “Yes, I saw her. She’s out there now. I cannot say where, but near enough to Upper Main Street I was told. There is danger for her. Paths to freedom and paths to bondage and death. But only she can choose.”

“I guess we’re making for Main,” Tommy said.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Mitch said to her.

“Oh yes, oh yes.” Wanda dragged off her cigarette. “I underestimated before what was about, what had taken hold of this town. I say to you know it is ancient and terrible. That there are those that called this up by practicing forbidden arts.”

Mitch said, “Fort Providence?”

Wanda nodded. “There is a beginning there. An ugly beginning. Seek it out, Mitch, then you’ll know.”

The kid who saved them from the clown was named Nigel.

He was a skinny little nothing kid who seemed perfectly at home in the new, devastated Witcham. He was really amazing. Flashlight in hand, old ugly Grimshanks battering his way through that door, Nigel led them down the corridor and then down a back staircase, out a window and back into the water. The route they took from there was circuitous?down flooded alleys and across avenues, up a fire escape and into an old apartment building.

“It’s okay,” he kept saying. “Just follow me! I know the way! I’ll take you to the lady! She’s the one that helped me!”

Nobody argued.

Nobody questioned.

Because really, when some demonic clown from a circus just this side of Hell wanted to maybe skin you and eat you and make balloon animals out of your intestines, what was there to argue or question? You accepted. Any port in a storm, as they said.

And that’s how they came to the dim, candlelit flat on the third floor. The one that smelled of fresh baked bread and platters of cookies hot from the oven. And that’s also how they met Mrs. Crowley. Dear, sweet, coveting Mrs. Crowley who was everyone’s grandma and favorite auntie. She sat in her rocker, knitting of all things, wearing a cranberry-colored dress and support hose that bagged at the ankles. Her hair was gray going to white, lustrous and full, a few stray fingers of it escaping her severe bun and tumbling to her shoulders. Everything about her was kind and comforting, even her finely-wrinkled face and sea-green eyes which were deep and relaxing like a country swimming hole you knew and trusted.

There was a fire going in the hearth and Brian, Chuck, Tara, and Mark stretched out before it like cats come in out of the rain. The wetness steamed from them. The heat and dryness felt so good, like warm fingers gently unlocking kinks in their backs and knots in their joints, massaging the feeling back into their numb limbs. It was all overwhelming and wonderful and how could you possibly question any of it?