Tim Curran - Resurrection

Mitch looked at him, swallowed, and looked away.

Tommy pulled the Dodge into a driveway, just behind a parked Neon. Then they sat there looking up at that narrow L-shaped clapboard house with its high-peaked roof. There was the bracket for an old TV antenna up there that had bled rusty stains over the green shingles. Just a house like any other house you might stumble across in the Midwest…yet, as Mitch looked up at it leaning out at him, it was every empty house on every weedy lot he had suspected of being haunted as a kid.

He knew the very idea was ridiculous.

The Bell house was neither rundown nor shabby, shunned nor shadowy. The windows were not planked over and no rusty FOR SALE sign creaked on dry posts. It was actually a very nice house, old-probably late 19^th century like most of the older homes in that section-but well-maintained. There were flower boxes out front and neatly-trimmed hedges, a flagstone path leading up to the front door. Definitely not a ghost house of any sort and if it hadn’t been for the sullen, leaden hues of the day washing it down with a grim uniformity and giving it roughly the same coloration as a cemetery monument, it would have been very pleasant.

But it was not pleasant.

Mitch could not adequately express even to himself what he was feeling, just that the house inspired dread in him, filled his belly with shards of broken glass he felt would slit him open if he dared move. Maybe it was nerves and maybe it was the knowledge that on days like this sundown could drop very fast and leave you groping. Maybe it was that and maybe something else.

“Cmon,” Tommy finally said, grabbing his Savage four-ten pump from the rifle rack and pumping shells into the breech. “Let’s get this done.”

“I’m not seeing Heather’s Bug around.”

“No, they’re probably not here…but I suppose we better check.”

They hopped out, Mitch in the lead. He went up the path to the porch, splashing through that foul-smelling water with his rubber boots. The rain was pissing down in gray sheets, stirring up a sluggish groundfog, and visibility was low. Looking in either direction down the block, he could not see anyone out and about. But he couldn’t see very far, either. He shook the rain off him and climbed the porch. There were a few flowerpots with withered plants in them. Nothing unusual for late September in northern Wisconsin. Most of the trees had already been stripped of leaves. Something which didn’t usually happen until mid- to late-October. Orange and yellow carpets of them bobbed in the street.

Tommy was looking at the porch swing.

It was wet like maybe a pile of soaking laundry had been set there. On the porch beneath it there was a puddle of gray water with bits of black debris floating in it. Kind of funny because the roof overhang had kept the rest of the porch pretty much dry. But Mitch figured rain could have been following a beam and dripping all afternoon.

Or maybe somebody very wet had been sitting there.

He let that go, went up to the door and knocked lightly. But there was no sound from inside.

“Maybe you should knock harder,” Tommy said.

So Mitch did and then thumbed the doorbell a couple times, hearing the ding-dong echoing from the depths of the house. Still silence. No approaching feet or anything. He supposed if someone got a look at them, particularly Tommy with his shotgun, they might not be so inclined to answer the door.

Mitch knocked a few more times and as he did so, a chill went right up his spine and spread over the backs of his forearms. He suddenly had the damnedest, most uncanny feeling that somebody was standing on the other side of that door, just waiting there like a kid playing hide-and-seek. The door itself was old hardwood with an oval glass panel set towards the top. A heavy cream-colored curtain covered the glass from the inside. You couldn’t see through that curtain exactly, but Mitch was almost certain that a form was throwing its shadow against it.

He reached down for the brass doorknob, but it was locked.

A second after he’d let it go, it rattled of its own accord like somebody was shaking it from inside.

“There’s somebody in there,” Tommy said.

Mitch knew it was true. He led Tommy off the porch and around through the sideyard, the water splashing up around the tops of their boots. The rain abated for a few moments, then came down heavy again. Off and on, off and on. They tried the backdoor and it was locked, too. All the windows were hung with sheers, so you could not actually see inside the house, but more than once Mitch was certain that a shadowy form passed by a window like somebody was watching their progress through the yard.

What the hell is this about?

They went back around front and stood at the bottom of the porch steps. The feeling that someone was standing behind the door watching them had not abated…it had grown to a near certainty.

“We could always go grab a beer and a burger, think this out,” Tommy said, his voice almost hopeful.

Mitch would have liked that very much. But as the minutes passed, he became more and more worried about Chrissy. Maybe she was home right now. Maybe this was all a wild goose chase. But he couldn’t let it rest at that. He loved her like his own flesh and blood and if getting some answers, or at least putting his mind to rest, meant he had to go inside this coffin, then he was going.

He charged up the steps in kind of a childish gesture so that whoever or whatever was in there would see he showed no fear, that he was ready to kick some ass. Without hesitation, he tried the knob and it was unlocked.

It turned easily in his hand.

He looked at Tommy and Tommy was starting to look a little pale.

“I ain’t liking this,” he said.

“Me either,” Mitch admitted. “But I guess…I guess somebody wants us to come in.”

“Don’t mean we have to,” Tommy said. “I tell you about my cousin Ginger? When she went in that house uninvited?”

“You got an awful lot of cousins, Tommy.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Mitch gripped the knob and threw the door open, stepped inside like he owned the joint and almost went on his ass. There was a puddle of water on the floor. Dark, dirty water like the run-off from a septic tank. And it didn’t smell much better, either. In fact, the whole house had a stagnant, vile stink to it like all the old pipes had burst, all the sediment and silt spilling out. It was the smell of seepage and old sewer lines.

“Smells like they got the rot in here,” Tommy said. “Got it bad, too.”

Blobs of water led from the doorway into the living room. Mitch could now make out distinct muddy prints in the blue shag carpeting. The smell was stronger in here. Tommy went over to a recliner. Its cushions, both bottom and back, were stained dark. He pressed the butt of the Savage into the ass cushion and water oozed out. A magazine-Newport News-was laying at the foot of the chair. The pages were mangled, streaked with dirty fingerprints like somebody with shit all over their hands had been leafing through it.

“C’mon,” Mitch said.

He led them through a dining room and into the kitchen. On the wall over the dinette table, somebody had scrawled a message in something like mud:

The letters were more of a looping childish scrawl than anything and whatever material was used had dripped like horror movie print.

“That supposed to be a joke?” Tommy said.

Mitch didn’t answer, because as he came around the table he saw the refrigerator. It was a pearl white Amana and the door was standing wide open. The shelves in there had been pretty much cleared, eggs shattered on the floor, mixing in with the contents of a milk carton, a shattered orange juice bottle, mustard, mayonnaise, a glop of pasta. There were dirty handprints all over the door and smears on the shelves inside.