Tim Curran - Resurrection

Mitch just nodded. “We better go in.”

On the porch, at the door, he hesitated again, picturing the most awful scenarios that waited him inside: Lily dead and Lily dismembered, white-faced horrors perhaps feeding upon her. All of it only grew worse when he tried the door and found it unlocked.

Then he threw it open and Tommy was right behind him and the silence greeted them, a heavy and almost unnatural silence. But maybe it was just his nerves because Lily was sitting on the sofa, waiting.

“Did you find her?” she asked.

Mitch shook his head. “Checked the mall and the usual locations, but I didn’t see her. But you know how those kids are. Always on the go.”

Lily just blinked at the information. “I don’t like her out in that storm, Mitch. It’ll be dark in a couple hours.”

The idea of that chilled Mitch, too. Was Lily hinting at something or was she just being her normal paranoid self?

Tommy looked from Mitch to Lily and then back again. Mitch couldn’t read his mind, but he could almost guess what he was thinking. Jesus H. Christ, you sure this lady is Lily? Looks like something thrown together out of twine and pipe cleaners. And her eyes, Mitch…you noticed her eyes? They’re just vacant. They look, but they don’t see. Just as empty and sterile as the eyes in old paintings that follow you around the room. Mitch was figuring it was something like that. Outside, he’d been the one who was tense, but in here it was Tommy. He looked nervous and ansy like some kid hauled before the principal for peeking into the girl’s showers.

Mitch said, “I got pretty much sidetracked. Had an accident.”

Something moved in her eyes then. “Accident?”

“Yeah, not me exactly. But some crazy kid piledrived the Jeep out on The Strip. It was parked at the time.”

Lily nodded, losing interest.

“Did anybody stop by?” Mitch asked, still standing there next to Tommy like he was at somebody else’s house, waiting to be invited to sit down.

Lily just shook her head. “No one…just the mailman, whasisface.”

Sure. Craig Ohlen. Goddamn nosy gasbag. Mitch was willing to bet that he’d went out of his way to talk to Lily, to gauge the level of her dementia that the neighbors had no doubt faithfully reported to him. Yep, she’s nuts, Craig would say, flakier than dry skin. Better hide the knives, ‘cause I’m getting the feeling she’ll be following her nutso sister.

“Mitch?” Lily said.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to go out again. I want you to find her before dark, do you understand? You have to. The phone’s out and the TV and radio are down-”

“Just the storm,” Tommy offered.

“-and I think there’s something that’s going to happen. Something real bad and I don’t want Chrissy out in the streets when it hits. Go to the police and check Heather and Lisa’s houses. Maybe she’s over there.”

“Okay, I will,” he said. “But just try to relax.”

“I can’t relax. I’m afraid to relax.”

“Just try and take it easy. You know what the doctor said, don’t get yourself worked up. Everything will be fine.”

“Just find her.”

“Sure.”

“Promise me that you’ll find her.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Inside Edward Stokley’s guts there was a furnace blazing.

It boiled white-hot where his stomach should have been, making things bubble and liquefy and go to rivers of molten flesh. The heat rose up into his chest, became a smoldering dust of ashes that filled his lungs until he could only gasp, could not seem to speak. It was like trying to draw a clear and crisp breath from the mouth of a foundry oven.

“Eddie?” Dave Rose said to him. “Eddie? Are you all right?”

Stokley nodded that he was, though he certainly was not.

They were standing in front of their patrol car on Pennacott Lane, just off Main downtown Witcham, at the outer edges of Bethany. The University was only three blocks away with its cheerful and synthetic gaggle of coffee shops and salons and snack bars, but here on Pennacott you would not have guessed it. For if Upper Main Street and the sprawl of the University were shiny new pennies, then Pennacott was a tarnished dime worn by many hands and plucked from a gutter. Pennacott was a dirty and decaying run of old company houses, garbage-strewn vacant lots, and late Victorian tenements that had been thrown up to lodge the massive influx of immigrant workers-mostly Poles, Irish and French-that had come to work in the mills and factories of Bethany and Crandon…at the time, separate entities that would, by the time of the First World War, be absorbed bodily into the swelling anatomy of Witcham. At one time, the squalor-which had been known locally as Guttertown or The Narrows-had extended to Main and beyond, for Witcham was essentially composed of five industrial enclaves, but by the 1950’s, North-Central University had absorbed much of that old territory of rooming houses, saloons, and brothels. And the Uptown Mall had taken the rest. Gone were the smelly community wells that had once spread outbreaks of cholera and typhus, the rows of high narrow warehouses and the Chicago-Northwestern train yards, the stables and stockyards whose drainage turned the Black River red and stinking at high summer. Gone too, were the linen mills and ironworks that stamped out everything from sewer lids to sections of railroad tracks, and whose high, filthy stacks belched out black clouds of smoke twenty-four/seven that settled back over the area like coal dust.

So now there was just Pennacott Lane which had been withered down through the years to a mere four blocks of dirty brick tenements and factory houses, many condemned and many more boarded-up and slouching on weedy lawns or behind rusty wrought-iron fences. Pennacott had once been the very heart of Guttertown, crowded and noisy, but now it was nearly deserted. You would no longer see the flapping, overloaded clotheslines strung building to building in such profusion that sometimes the sky seemed barely visible or the gangs of children chasing balls up the wooden walks, the street cars and bustling traffic of wagons and carts, the crowds of workmen lingering outside taverns and lunch counters. And you would not hear the scream of foundry whistles marking shift-change or the smattering of European dialects and sub-dialects echoing in the streets. And you would not smell the crowding, the horseshit, the reek of the mills themselves.

Pennacott was but a tombstone to that colorful, desperate past, a rawboned cadaver seeking a shallow grave to while away eternity. But, sometimes, if you closed your eyes and opened your mind, you could still feel and hear the echoes of those ghosts, the impressions they had left and the memories bleeding from dirty brick and cracked foundation like tired blood from narrow arteries.

Stokley stood there amongst those haunted streets, knowing that even now the city fathers had their eyes on the final remnants of Guttertown and how they would finally raze it, brooming away the nasty residue of Witcham’s seedy proletariat past and the poor that squatted there…many of whom were direct descendants of those long-gone laborers.

Just as he was.

He swallowed down some rain, hoped it would cool the firestorm in his belly that had absolutely nothing to do with what this place had been or what it was now, but a most disturbing feeling that told him today was going to be a very bad day for him indeed. He’d felt it all morning and most of the afternoon, of course. Had woken up at six that morning, a full thirty minutes before the alarm clock chimed, sweating and trembling, his eyes peeled white in his strained face, a terrible knowledge of impending doom laying over him just as heavy and eternal as six feet of graveyard earth. The rain had been tapping against the windows and he had felt it inside, too, flooding him.