Tim Curran - Resurrection

“What?” his wife had said, suspecting the steak and lasagna from the night before, but then looking into her husband’s blanched face and knowing better. “Eddie? Eddie? What is it?”

He told her in an airless squeak that it was a dream, just some crazy inside-out dream about his dead brother and a cat they’d had. He wasn’t even sure why that lie had leaped onto his tongue so completely unbidden. But he wasn’t awake yet and his subconscious-which was full to brimming as any man’s with half-truths, un-truths, and complete fabrications-was still open, the lid askew, and this was the pearl it had vomited onto his tongue.

At his side, rain running down his face like teardrops, Dave Rose said again, “You okay, Eddie? Look like you seen your own ghost.”

Stokley could have laughed at that one.

Lots of cops on the Witcham force could have. Not Dave Rose, though. Dave Rose had just come in yesterday night after two weeks of vacation and he had missed all the fun. He only knew the clipped versions of the explosion at the Fort Providence base and the flooding and the bodies over in River Town, all those awful, dark matters that hid in the cracks between those incidents. Unlike him, Stokley had seen ghosts. He’d seen several. He’d seen dead people walking and it was this knowledge that had settled into his guts like a tumor, eating and eating. But Dave Rose had not seen any of that. Yet.

But soon, soon…

“I’m all right,” Stokley said and, God, did that sound hollow or what? Like having your hand crushed to pulp in a vise and saying it was just a scratch, get me a Band-Aid, will ya?

Maybe all of it was laying on him. Those things with the white faces he’d seen yesterday disappearing beneath the dirty waters of Bethany and that awful certainty he’d woken with this morning. The certainty that told him, sorry, Eddie, really and truly sorry, old shoe, but today is the last one for you. No more Australian-rules football on ESPN or late-night lasagna and steak parties. It all winds down today and in this place where your Irish grandfather came a-squatting, pockets empty and eyes bright, from that slum in Londonderry.

“Full circle,” Stokley said. “Full circle.”

Rose looked at him and then just looked away. “Listen, we gonna answer this call or do we stand here and get soaked?”

The rain kept falling, trying desperately to wash that pile of dirty tenement clean, but failing miserably. The tenement-some three stories of filthy brick with a mangled, rusting fire escape clinging to its side like the abandoned web of a spider-was high and shadowy in the grainy light of this rainy day. Shadows pooled at its windows and crawled over its roofs. Water spilled from a rainspout into the alley.

“Let’s go,” Stokley said, feeling that windy noose that had dogged him all day finally dropping over his throat and tightening.

They stepped into the tenement and right away that stink of age and generations past fell over them…mildew and rotting plaster and garbage. This mixed with more recent odors of cat piss and seeping damp. There were three kids waiting for them. Two girls and a boy. The oldest couldn’t have been more than six or seven, the youngest still in diapers. They were smelly, thin, and unwashed.

“You kids the ones that called?”

The two girls would not speak, but the boy nodded and mumbled something. Stokley and Rose surrounded them, pegging them with questions and getting answers that made little sense. The girls were crying. The youngest had an overflowing diaper on. It had not been changed in days.

“Tell us what happened,” Stokley said.

The boy tried to, but he was having trouble. There was despair and pain that had no business in a kid his age. But it was there, especially in his eyes that were looms that could spin tales of desperation and ugliness without his mouth ever opening.

Stokley listened patiently as the boy tried to get it out, but it took time. It was not easy. The bigness of his dread would barely fit up the channel of his throat. Stokley heard something of the sort he knew he would hear. When he had arrived and looked up at the place his heart had hammered almost painfully, but now it had settled into a dull and disquieting rhythm. Even with what he heard, it did not so much as hitch.

The boy told him that his mother had been up in her room for three days and that she would not come out. She had in fact locked the door. He had been caring for his sisters and it was only yesterday that he had heard her moving around in there again.

“It smells funny from her room,” the boy said. “And she makes me go get her things.”

What kind of things? Stokley asked him and the kid said his mother had started whispering through the door that she wanted dead things. She said there were plenty of dead things floating around in the streets and that he was to bring them home. He brought her a dead cat, a dead cocker spaniel, and three dead rats. She told him to leave those things at the door and to not look when she opened it. The kid had not. He had never looked, even though a smell of warm, rotting things had wafted out. The kid said he thought she was eating those carcasses, that he heard her slurping and chewing on them. And then this morning, when she’d reached out to take a swollen rat corpse, he had dared to look. He said she was sick because her arm was bumpy and white and there were little things crawling on it.

“Davey,” Stokley said to Rose, “get these kids out of here. Get on the horn with Child Protective Services. Go, move, now!”

When Rose had ushered them out the door, a wild look in his eyes, Stokley had started up those creaking, ancient stairs. The banister rail was oily and smoothed by generations of grimy working hands. What struck him the strongest was the sheer silence of that building. He wondered vaguely if anyone even lived there besides the woman and her kids. The silence was so pronounced it reminded him of walking through a funeral home, seeing all the display rooms with their comfortable furniture awaiting grieving bodies. It was much like that.

Too quiet, like they said in the old movies.

Up Stokley went until he hit the third floor, his guts continuing to boil and froth in his belly. Even had he not known the number of the flat, his nose would have led him there. The stench wafting out the half-opened door was sickening. A raw stink of things slimy and putrid that had slipped out of waterlogged graves.

Stokley slipped his 9mm Beretta out of its holster and clicked it off safety. The gun had always made him feel strong and somehow invincible. But today, it felt entirely useless like a handful of peas he was going to toss at a hungry giant.

What’s waiting for you in there, Eddie, has crossed the barrier. It has crawled like a living, seething pestilence from the other side. Bullets will not stay it, will not put it back down again. It has risen and it is wise and evil.

Stokley saw old furniture with gaping holes, missing cushions, and stacks of books in place of chair legs. The wallpaper was yellowed and curling, fifty years out of date. Water dripped from the cracked plaster of the ceiling. Garbage was strewn everywhere with the remains of meals on dirty plates. Heaps of musty laundry fought for space with broken toys. There was a TV with a shattered picture tube.

“Mrs. Holmes,” Stokley heard his voice call out. “I’m Stokley of the police. We have your kids. I think you better come out and answer a few questions.”

There was only silence from beyond a soiled bedroom door for maybe thirty seconds and then a meaty, wet sound like bones being pulled from boiled chicken. Stokley knew then it was the sound of her moving. There was a creak as of bedsprings, then a sticky, slopping sound that must have been feet crossing the room.