Tim Curran - Resurrection

Something thudded against the door. Something else dripped. And then a voice like mud spilled into a bucket: “You go away and bring my children back, you hear? You bring them back or I’ll come and get them…”

It was a threat and he took it as the same. The door began to open and something like a hand hooked around its edge…only it was gnarled and spidery, fleshed in a skin that was a translucent white like ectoplasm and pebbly, set with contusions and festering sores.

Stokley felt his heart drop away into some sucking, black hole within him as she shambled out of the coveting shadows, flyblown and crawling with worms.

Thing was, he had seen her before.

As a child, he remembered her. She was the witch from his nightmares. A pallid haunter of the dark with a crooked back and a mop of graying, oily hair. Her belly was filled with child-meat and her teeth had been sharpened on child-bones. She lived in moldering closets and dank cellars, always creeping forth when lights went out and the sound of his parents footfalls vanished down the hallway. She was here, reaching out for him with fingers like threshing hooks and an oval, drooping mouth filled with roofing nails.

Stokley stepped back, a very real terror blossoming in his belly like night-blooming orchids opening in a crypt. It was the sort of terror that made him feel loose inside like maybe he was unraveling.

Mrs. Holmes, or the thing she now was, shambled forth with a slushy, rubbery sound and Stokley noticed that she was leaving dark tracks in her wake, that bits of her soles were stuck in those prints. She brought a nauseous flyblown odor with her, the stink of what she was and what she had been chewing on in that moist, dark tomb of hers. She wore a dirty shift that might have been a slip or a nightdress at one time, but now was just as soiled as a painter’s dropcloth…stained with whorls and blotches of brown and gray fluids. Her flesh was baggy as if it was blown up from the bones beneath by gas. It looked viscid, spongy like some sort of cemetery fungi that had erupted from a buried box. There were tumorous-looking graying boils set in it and as she came forth, they popped like soap bubbles, black fluid leaking from them with a stink of rotting fish.

“Stay back,” Stokley told her, knowing how impotent that was, and wondering what might have happened here if he had just did as she asked. If he had brought her children back. Would she have stayed in that room? Would she have been content to eat the carrion they brought and leave them unmolested? Was it possible that, in that reeking hide, there still burned a flame of motherhood? That she had woken from death as something malignant, yes, but also something with the ingrained and instinctual need to protect her young?

These thoughts flew through his head at amazing speed, but not a one actually stuck for the fear and revulsion filling him was simply too overwhelming.

About four feet from him, she stopped.

Stopped, cocked her head, and looked at him with eyes bleached white as grubs. Her face was contorted and hanging, a mask stitched together out of rags and wrinkles, set with scars and gaping holes. Poison drizzled from her colorless eyes and things squirmed inside her mouth. Her fissured lips pulled back from those decayed teeth. And that voice again, still like poured mud, but sweeter and strident almost: “Do you remember me, Eddie? Do you remember your old childhood friend? Do you remember me giggling in the closet and scratching under your bed and scraping my nails at your window pane? Of course you do! Just as you remember what I said to you…how I would nibble your gizzard and chew on your guts and wear your bowels as my necklace! Hee, hee, you remember, don’t you? And when I was done, as your precious mommy and daddy slept but two doors down, I would hold your hot and pumping heart in my hand and set my teeth into it…”

Stokley almost fell over.

He could feel her hot and rancid breath in his face like swamp gas.

But it had to be in his mind. He did not doubt the revolting physical reality of this living corpse before him, but she could not know his name and his boyhood fears. She just could not know these things. Offended by the very idea of it, his finger began jerking the trigger of the 9mm. The slugs passed cleanly through her with very little give at all. She jerked, but no more. It was like shooting into a wet canvas sack filled with carrion…holes were drilled into her and dark meat splattered against the wall behind her, but it had no more lasting effect.

Stokley heard himself scream as one of her hands closed over his gun-hand, gripping it tightly, a stinking juice running over his fist as from a squeezed out rag. And as she gripped, the flesh at the knuckles of that fungous hand popped open and a black acidic slime sprayed into his face, burning him and blinding him.

Then she had him, bathing him in her cold light and the smell of violated tombyards. She yanked him forward into her waiting stick arms and he fell against her, enveloped by her, his clawing fingers sinking into her flesh which had no more substance than cold bacon grease. Then that oval, dripping mouth was descending to swallow his own.

“This is what happens to bad boys, Eddie!” she breathed in his face. “This is what happens to bad little boys who don’t say their prayers at night! Now I have you and I won’t let go! Now I’ll suck your yummy guts out through your mouth and fill my empty belly…”

Which is exactly what she did.

Burned and insane and offended by the feel of her, Stokley just let it happen. And as he was vacuumed clean, he could only remember waking that morning and hearing the rain on the window. It sounded very much like his own blood did now as it struck the floor.

Ten minutes after they left Lily, Mitch and Tommy stopped by a 7-11 and got the strongest, blackest coffee they could dredge up from that bottomless pot. They said they needed it to steady their nerves and keep themselves awake, but truthfully, with all that they had seen now and those worse things they imagined, it was unlikely either of them would be nodding off for some time.

It was four in the afternoon by then and Mitch was almost shocked when he realized this. All these awful things happened in the span of a single day and in just a few hours to boot. It was more than a little amazing.

He thought: I woke up this morning only wanting this goddamned storm system to pass already and now here I am believing in zombies and all manner of crazy Halloween shit.

Tommy took them over to the West Town Mall where once again, Mitch hunted for Heather Sale’s little orange VW bug in the parking lot. There were something like 200 stores at Westtown and this was reflected by the massive wraparound parking lot that, flood or no flood, was easily two-thirds full. Something that Mitch found amazing with the things he had seen now.

Tommy parked outside Kohl’s and just sat there staring at him.

“What?” Mitch finally said, stealing another of his cigarettes.

Tommy just shook his head. “How can any of this shit be, Mitch? I mean…we did see what we saw today, am I right? I didn’t imagine that shit at Sadler’s or that dead bitch they pulled out of the pipe?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Then how? How in the Christ can this be?”

He was like a little boy looking for answers about the big, brave world. How come the stars don’t fall from heaven or the birds know how to fly south, Uncle Mitch? Except in this case it was a little more along the lines of, how can the dead be walking and why are they so pissed at the living? How can a lady with no legs and half her body all burned up like she’d been slow roasted on one side, still be moving? And why does the yellow rain make people melt? Mitch wished he had some good answers, but all he had were a lot more questions.