Tim Curran - Resurrection

Somebody had been looking for something.

And then Mitch saw what it was. Where the kitchen opened back into the hallway, there was a ceramic plate and strands of shredded butcher paper that were pink with blood. Bits of hamburger were stuck to them. Somebody had torn it open, eating it raw and-judging from the trail of bloody hamburger fragments-had been walking away as they did so, clots of raw meat dropping from their mouth as they went.

“Not much on housekeeping, these Bell’s,” Tommy said, trying to be funny and failing.

A series of black, watery prints led away into the hallway. Mitch peeked into a bathroom and saw nothing. And right about then, Tommy let out a little surprised shriek.

“What?” Mitch said. “What the hell is it?”

Tommy’s mouth was moving but nothing was coming out. He had his Savage up and he was looking wildly from a mirror hung on the hallway wall to the stairs leading to the second floor. “Saw…saw a girl standing there,” he managed, his breath coming very fast and shallow-sounding. “Saw her in the mirror…girl just standing there in a dirty dress or something, hair stuck to her face. She was looking at me.”

There was no one there now.

Mitch, something tensing in his belly, looked into the mirror. It reflected the stairs, part of the living room. He went over to the stairs. There was a pool of water soaking into the carpet like somebody dripping wet had been standing there. More of those filthy prints went up the stairs.

“I’ve had enough of this spooky shit,” Tommy said, breezing right past him. “Somebody’s playing games and I got a new game they never heard of.”

He mounted the steps and Mitch was at his side. They were both frightened now, afraid of things they could not see and maybe more frightened of those things that could see them. They moved up the stairs slowly. At the top they could see part of a plaster wall and a painting of flowers in a brass pot, but nothing else. They could hear each other’s labored breathing and the rain striking the house.

Then above, the sound of a door creaking open followed by footsteps that were wet and mucky like someone was walking around up there with sponges strapped to their feet.

Somebody was up there, just around the bend of the corridor.

Mitch could smell them…the stink of things stranded by a tide, briny and noisome.

Then a door slammed so loudly from above, they jumped.

But they kept going, knowing in their hearts that if either of them had been alone they would probably have run right out the front door. More of those stinking, wet prints were in the hallway above as if their owner had been tramping through the black silt of river bottoms.

There was a long muddy streak along the wall like an oily rag had been dragged along it. But it hadn’t been a rag, Mitch knew, but a hand.

The dirty prints ended at a closed door. There were others shut or half-opened, but whoever was up there was behind this one. There were black stains all over its panels.

Mitch tried it, brushing muck from the knob.

It was locked. From the inside.

He looked over at Tommy and they understood each other. Tommy brought up the four-ten and Mitch made ready. At some unspoken, but understood moment, he brought up his size eleven boot and kicked out with everything he had, giving it the old Kwai Chang Caine treatment. It was just a cheap hollow door and the lock gave instantly, the door slamming right open. And then both Mitch and Tommy charged in there, becoming comically wedged in the doorframe as they tried to vault through shoulder to shoulder like Moe and Curly. Mitch pulled back because Tommy had the gun, a manic voice in his head saying, spread out, you knucklehead.

The room was probably the master bedroom. It was quite large with an oak four-poster bed and powder gray carpeting. There were muddy prints all over it, of course. As they stepped across it, standing water seeped up from the fibers. The embroidered coverlet on the bed was black with a foul, slimy stain like somebody especially grubby had laid there. And the stink was almost overpowering…pipes clogged with hair and grease and rotting scraps, heaps of decaying leaves…and maybe a worse undersmell of the noxious thing that had been laying in such filth.

None of this interested Mitch and Tommy, though.

There was a doorway leading to a bathroom and that’s where this person had to be. The closet stood open-more dirty smudges on the clothes in there as if polluted fingers had been sorting through them-and they could see everything in there. No room for the girl to hide.

She had to be in the bathroom.

Tommy started towards it. “You better cross your legs, you little bitch, because here I come.”

There was no one in there.

But there had been. The tiled floor was stained with crud and silt. There were black, muddy prints all over the mirror. The tub had been filled and there was a gray scum on the water…but nothing hiding beneath. A small square of window, about large enough for a little kid to squeeze through was standing open, the curtains billowing, a wet mist blowing in. The sill was absolutely black.

“She must’ve went out that window,” Tommy said like he couldn’t believe it.

Mitch started over to it, some slightly neurotic voice in his head crying out, what in the hell happened here? Some dead and waterlogged thing came into this house, sat in a recliner and paged through a magazine? Laid on a bed and drew a bath, rummaged through the clothes in the closet? It was madness. What the hell could it possibly be about? But maybe the dead clung tightly to the daily rituals of life and this thing, this girl, had just been going through the motions.

You can’t know that!

Yet, he felt this was as close to an answer as his brain could furnish him with. There were patterns, insane ones perhaps, that were still in play in dead brains. He wanted to think that this girl had been some living waif, but his heart and maybe his soul would not accept this.

“What the hell is that?” Tommy said.

Amongst the settled black goo on the windowsill, there was something fleshy and white curled like a bloated angleworm.

Mitch tried to swallow and couldn’t. “I think…I think it’s a finger.”

Tommy prodded it with the barrel of his shotgun and it moved, it unfurled like a sleeping caterpillar and dropped to floor, squirming. Mitch made a disgusted sound and kicked it behind the toilet. He looked out the window at the falling rain. Felt it in his face and it was good to feel connected to something real. This thing, this girl had certainly not been alive…she was filthy and rotting, spilling some festering black juice like the ink of a squid. And she had been so soft and pulpy, she had been falling apart.

He stuck his head out the window, certain he would feel two spongy hands wind around his throat. There was nowhere to jump. Just a straight drop to the wet grass below. Nobody was down there. Nobody at all. Mitch craned his head and looked up…well, there you go. There were greasy, ebony stains going right up the vinyl siding to the roof overhang like some mucky human spider had climbed right up its face. Rain blew into his eyes and he wiped it free.

And then he let out a little cry as he thought he saw a grinning white face peering at him from the edge of the chimney stack.

But then it was gone.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he told Tommy.

They both made for the stairs, moving at a good clip now. Mitch felt an almost physical wave of horror settle into him with a sickening weight. He almost expected every door in that silent, brooding house to slam open-particularly the cellar door-and things to begin creeping out. Faceless things and dripping things, crawling and slinking things. Yellow-eyed monstrosities that waited in webby, damp cellar corners to disembowel unwary children. A host of tenebrous and macabre horrors that had crawled from some crack in the floor of Hell.