Tim Curran - Resurrection

Chuck didn’t know what had happened inside him.

But it was there. It was real and, yes, it was very important.

So he was suspicious, paranoid, he did not trust. He felt responsible for these kids. He had to lead them home, no one else, only him. They seemed fine with all this, with Mrs. Crowley and her grandmotherly ways, but they’d also thought that clown was just Bozo or Clarabelle or Cookie, friendly and harmless. And they’d been wrong, hadn’t they? Terribly, dangerously wrong…

The cookies and cocoa came and the other kids dove in.

Who could blame them? Platters of hot steaming cocoa that smelled chocolatey and rich. Trays of peanut butter cookies and chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies and mint cookies and lemon cookies. Cookies with cherries on them and white frosting, chocolate kisses and vanilla swirls. And all of them warm to the touch as if they’d just come from the oven and they must have.

Chuck watched Tara and Brian and Mark stuffing their faces, greedy fingers putting delicious cookies into greedy mouths. Cups of cocoa were raised and ooohed and aahed over. The faces of the kids were grinning and happy. They were laughing and crying tears of joy.

Nigel just watched.

Mrs. Crowley just watched.

And Chuck watched them suddenly horrified by what was happening here. They watched the kids like a couple slat-thin, ravenous wolves watching the three little pigs gorge themselves on goodies and treats, their fat pink bellies ready to burst. Fattening them up, a voice in Chuck’s head said, fattening them up for the stewpot. Whether it was true or febrile imagination run wild, he suddenly wanted to scream at the intimation of horror he felt. When he looked at the cookies, one word popped into his head: bait. Like when you were fishing, you impaled that worm on the hook, hiding the barb that would catch your fish, that would rip through its mouth in a bloody spray and hold it fast. And then his eyes drifted over to Nigel and he remembered a documentary they’d seen in school last year. How when cattle were led to slaughter, a decoy cow was used. A cow trained to lead the others into the slaughterhouse where they would be stunned and gutted and carved-up.

And that’s what Nigel was.

A decoy.

He had led them here and they had followed him, they had trusted him. If a dark, perverse stranger asked you to get into his car, you ran away. But if another kid said, hey, my dad’ll give us a ride, get in. Well, you went, didn’t you? Because that kid was part of your tribe and you could trust him.

It was about this time, as Chuck’s belly filled with white ice, that he noticed something else, too. Mrs. Crowley and Nigel…they were both drooling.

“Aren’t you going to have some cookies, Chuck?” she asked him, wiping her mouth with a hand that was skeletal and yellow-skinned.

“I’m…I’m not hungry.”

“Sure you are,” she said.

Chuck looked at Nigel. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Nigel shook his head. “I’m not hungry. I’ll eat later.”

Mrs. Crowley held out a platter of cookies to Chuck. “Have one,” she said, her face very pallid and fissured like dry bark, her eyes behind those spectacles filling with blood. “It isn’t polite to refuse.”

Chuck slid back in his chair, an inch, maybe two or three. He was terrified now, knowing the secret and wishing he didn’t. All a carefully-constructed ruse to pull them in. That’s all it was. This apartment was nothing but one of those Roach Motels you see on TV where the roaches check in, but they don’t check out.

And Chuck thought: How did you bake those cookies and heat that cocoa, Mrs. Crowley? I might just be ten-years old and maybe I don’t know everything, but my dad owns lots of rentals and I know a stove needs gas or electricity or even a tank of propane to operate with. There’s not a bunch of hamsters running on a wheel inside it. And there’s no electricity and no gas now, Mrs. Crowley…so how did you make this happen? Am I supposed to believe that you have one of those big black potbellied stoves in the kitchen like Little Red Riding Hood’s gramma? That you feed it sticks and kindling?

“Have a cookie,” she said and it was not an invitation, but an order.

Chuck felt like he might throw up. Because her breath wasn’t sweet like mints or chewing gum, it was repellent and fetid. It smelled like the fumes coming from a dead cat that had exploded with the gases of decomposition. Like she had been chewing on that cat, licking the graying meat from its bones and sucking the spoiled, jellied brains from its skull.

He almost threw-up.

He looked at the others and they saw nothing, were aware of only the fantasy that had been skillfully woven around them. This was reality to them. They looked fat and happy, their eyes dreamy, all slouching sleepily in their chairs.

“Oh, that was good,” he heard Brian say.

Tara made a purring sound like a contented tabby.

Mrs. Crowley was sitting forward in her chair and her dress was ragged and dirty, clots of earth falling from the hem. Her face was ghostly white, the color of a moist, fruiting fungus you might find beneath a rotting log. And like that fungus, it was puckered and pitted, things scurrying just beneath the skin. Her eyes had gone a sickly yellow, threaded with fat red veins, a shiny membrane covering them.

“Have a cookie, you little shit, or I’ll jam it down your fucking throat!” she snarled at him.

“No, no, no,” Chuck said.

The other kids did not even notice what was happening. They looked at each other and laughed, yawned, talked about what they were going to do when they finally got home, never realizing they were fattened flies hanging in the web of a spider and that they would never, ever go home again.

“Have a cookie,” Nigel said.

He sat there with the others, a dead little boy in a black burial suit that had grown dark pockets of mold. His face was shriveled and white, his grinning mouth exposing blackened teeth, his empty eye sockets filled with pale, squirming things.

Chuck looked at the platter Mrs. Crowley had shoved in his face.

There were no cookies on it.

Not a one.

There were only the carapaces of dead insects…slabs of festering, greenish meat boiling with maggots…things like decayed eyes and organs and loops of bowel crusted with spots of mildew. Some mummified fingers. Small black ants crawled over everything, a living carpet of them.

Chuck screamed.

All the platters were filled with carrion and insects.

The other kids smiled happily. Brian said something and a plump maggot wriggled out from between his lips and fell to his lap. He brushed it aside like a stray crumb. Mark took a last swallow of cocoa and it spilled down his chin, except that it was blood, a thick and syrupy blood like that which might leak from the belly of a corpse.

In some back room of his mind, Chuck could hear Grimshanks the clown’s grating voice, Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?

Mrs. Crowley laughed, dumping the platter on Chuck’s lap. He cried out, scattering worms and beetles and rotten meat from his legs.

“You don’t like the drink and food what is offered, young man?” she said, her voice scraping and dusty. “You do not like the meat and blood offered? The meat is high and gamy and pleasing to them what favors it…”

Mrs. Crowley plucked a finger from one of the trays, held it out to him in her own scabby hand. Yellow mucus-like strings of drool hung from her lips. Carefully, with a tongue that was split open with cracks and spotted like that of a hound, she licked the ants from it and then popped the finger in her mouth. With a crunching, pulping side-to-side motion of her jaws, she ate it.

“The meat is good,” she said, a strip of skin caught in the corner of her lips. “Long have I dreamed of the meat and marrow and organ stuffs. Long have I wished for the time of the feeding and the filling. Bad little boys and bad little girls! Ah, sweet gravies and blood soups, bone meal and meaty stews, fleshy joints and well-marbled cuts ready for the spicing!”