Tim Curran - Resurrection

He pulled the patrol car through the gates and slowed to a crawl. All those stones and markers winding off into the gray, wet haze made a chill run up his spine. Everything was colorless and almost surreal, tombs and monuments hung with wreaths of pale mist. The road thick with fallen leaves. Everything was so silent, so empty, they could have been the last two men on earth. And if that was the case, this was a hell of a place to pass the time.

“Hate these places,” Rose said. “Reminds me of when I was a kid and my Uncle Tony ate the gun. He got back from Vietnam and he couldn’t cope. Blew his brains out. It was bad, real bad. I remember that funeral. It was a day like this. Just rainy and misty, real creepy. Everybody crying at the graveside. God. After that, things were funny in our neighborhood. Real funny. Kids started saying crazy shit. Shit that scared the hell out of me.”

“What sort of shit?” Marcus asked, knowing he was going to regret it.

Rose shook his head, sighed. “Ah, you know how kids are. Make up things. Started saying how they were seeing Tony around the neighborhood. Just standing around in the vacant lot where we’d played ball and stuff. Standing there with his uniform on, smiling, most of his head shot away. One night, there was a knock on the door and when my mom answered it, there was nobody there. My brother started screaming, saying it was Uncle Tony, Uncle Tony. He’d seen him looking through the window at him. And our bedroom was on the second floor. How do you like that? One time, we heard footsteps coming up the stairs, only when we opened our door, there wasn’t nobody there-”

“All right already, Dave. Jesus H. Christ.”

“I’m just making conversation.”

Marcus looked over at him. “We’re in a cemetery and the best you can do is a ghost story?”

Rose chuckled. “I see your point.”

Marcus wheeled the patrol car past the chapel and a couple grim, lichen-encrusted statues of Jesus and Mary, following the winding dirt road over to the caretaker’s shack. It was set in a copse of big oaks, stripped now, yellow leaves floating in puddles and the hollows of sunken graves. Nothing out there but rows of tombstones, old ones mostly, worn and leaning and dripping. A collection of mossy crypts flanking them. A pick-up truck was parked next to the shack.

Marcus pulled the car to a stop. He grabbed the mic. “Dispatch? This is Fifteen. We’re at Hope Street Cemetery location. Leaving car. Standby.”

“Ten-four, Fifteen,” came the reply.

They got out into that chill mist which seemed immediately to go up the backs of their raincoats until it found their spines. A gentle rain fell. Fingers of ground fog slithered amongst the tombstones like snakes. You could hear the patrol car idling, water dripping onto the fallen leaves and the plastic rain-bonnets of their hats, but nothing more.

Rose knocked on the shed door. “Hello? Police here.”

There was no answer.

“Well, this caretaker can’t be too excited to see us. Vandalism. What happened? Somebody spray paint naughty words on the stones?”

“Stop it,” Marcus said. “Show some respect.”

“Respect, he says. After the day I had, you’d think you’d show me a little sympathy, Pat. Goddamn Eddie. Fuck am I gonna do without Eddie?”

“Don’t start that again.”

Marcus pushed past him and let himself into the shed. There were racks of tools and shovels, lawnmowers and weed-eaters, bags of fertilizer, the usual. There was a rich, dark smell in there of mown grass and black earth. A little desk was pushed against the wall. It was crowded with papers and a few magazines. A paperback western was opened as if it had just been set aside. On the wall above the desk there was a calendar with a blonde in blue-jean cut-offs exposing her impressive breasts.

This is what Rose was looking at. “Look at those jugs, Pat.”

But Marcus was not interested. He was not a religious guy really, but the idea of a young woman thrusting out her breasts in a place like this seemed sacrilegious or something. He bet that model never thought she’d be showing her goods in a graveyard shed.

There was a cup of coffee on the desk next to a Thermos. “Still warm,” he said. “I bet our boy hasn’t been gone long.”

Rose pulled his eyes off the lady’s charms. “Well, where the hell is he?” He walked over to a little window that looked out towards those old tombs. “Don’t see nobody around.”

Marcus didn’t either.

And that was starting to bother him in ways he could not adequately fathom. On the surface, it seemed to mean nothing: the caretaker had stepped out for a moment or two, that’s all. Nothing to get worked up about. But much deeper, in places Marcus did not wish to plumb, he was certain it meant something. That the silence here was trying to tell him something. Maybe it was trying to warn him away.

Knock it off, he told himself. You’re getting as bad as Rose. You start believing in omens and premonitions and that kiddie campfire shit, it’s time to hang it up.

Rose turned away from the window. “Let’s give it five minutes. He don’t show, we take off. To hell with this guy.”

Now Dave was talking sense. For what else could they really do? Marcus was going to tell his interim partner just that, but when he looked over at him, he saw something outside the window. Not something, really, but somebody. Just a glimpse of face looking in at them. But the effect was immediate. He gasped and almost fell over.

“Jesus Christ, Pat…you okay?”

Marcus licked his lips. “Yeah…I just saw somebody.”

Rose swung around. He peered out the window. Not only peered out, but pressed his face up against the rain-spattered pane and looked long and hard. Marcus felt his throat narrow to a pinhole. He wanted to tell Rose not to do that, not to get so goddamn close. That’s how thick the paranoia in him was. Like maybe he thought something might reach through the glass and take hold of him.

“Don’t see anybody,” Rose said. He shrugged and walked over to the door.

“What’re you doing?” Marcus asked him.

“I’m seeing if I can catch our caretaker,” he said. “Why? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

But Marcus just shook his head. That image…glimpsed for the briefest of moments…turned something inside him. Made his stomach tighten and a chill run down his spine. “It…I don’t think it was the caretaker.”

Rose stopped as he was reaching for the doorknob. He looked at Marcus, not sure what any of this was about. “You’re kind of freaking me out here, Pat.”

“Sorry. I guess that face startled me.”

“Why?”

He swallowed. Why, indeed? How was he suppose to answer that in any way that made sense? Was he supposed to tell Rose that that face was not right somehow? That it was too pale? Too skullish? The grin too crooked? That it was just wrong in every way imaginable?

In the end, he said nothing.

Rose just stared at him and at that precise moment when he was probably going to call Marcus a nut, there was a loud pounding on the door that made him retract his outstretched hand as if the door had suddenly gotten too hot.

“This is bullshit,” Rose said.

He took hold of the knob, opened it and threw the door open.

Marcus felt his heart skip a beat. He didn’t know what he was expecting out there, but there was nothing. Just the rain falling from the roof overhang, a few wisps of that mist. The graveyard beyond. Nothing else.

“You sure you saw somebody?” Rose said.

“I thought I did.”

They both went out the door and Marcus steeled himself, pumped up something inside him so he wouldn’t get the heebie-jeebies. He walked out the door feeling like the big tough cop of ten years he in fact was.