Tim Curran - Resurrection

Deke realized then he was smiling and he couldn’t seem to stop.

He was seeing Nicky down there, sloshing through the water in a mildewed burial suit, his face like a fungus.

“Is there someone you’ve lost, Deke?” Lily said, getting psychic on him now.

“No,” he said, more sternly than he’d intended.

But Lily just grinned. “We’ve all lost, but maybe in the end, we can all find again.”

Deke was shifting in his seat now. He wasn’t up to dealing with this. He didn’t know how to handle it or what to say. Where was Mitch? He would know what to do. He always knew what to do. “But Mrs. Barron…that…that was just a dream.”

But Lily shook her head. Patient and kind as if she were dealing with a complete idiot that insisted the world was flat. “No, it’s more than that. Much more than that. I’m not crazy, Deke, it’s just that I can’t stand being alone anymore. I miss Marlene and she misses me.”

“But she’s dead, Mrs. Barron.”

Lily nodded. “Yes, but she’s no longer in her grave.” She paused, listening again for something Deke could not hear and was pretty sure he would never want to. “Before you came…I went upstairs. In the sink, yes, in the sink I heard a voice calling to me up out of the pipe. It was Marlene’s voice. She said, we’re below, far below. Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us.”

Okay, this was insane now. Voices from drainpipes. Lily had hallucinated it all, of course. He had to keep that in mind. She was not well. Because if the voice of a dead person called up to him from those pipes, black and gurgling, he would have screamed. Yes, he would have screamed and right then, the idea of dead voices calling up drainpipes to a mad woman made him want to start. Oh, but Jesus, dude, get a grip here. This is all wicked mad bullshit. Dead people aren’t down in the sewers and they don’t call to the living, they don’t-

“So that’s what I was listening for, Deke, when you came,” Lily said. Her eyes were huge and feverish, her mouth gone crooked. She brushed pale fingers to the paleness of her face, cocking her head. “I thought…I thought maybe I heard a scraping and I knew it was Marlene, she was scratching at the sewer lid from below.”

Deke figured that must have sounded like dead fingers scratching at the inside of a coffin lid, begging to be let out. But he wouldn’t go there. He just wouldn’t. Could madness be infectious? Could you go crazy being with a crazy person? For he thought maybe he was losing his mind, because, God help him, he almost believed Lily. There was absolute conviction in her eyes and didn’t that count for something?

No, it does not.

That was reason talking and he had to listen to it. Because it all made him think of Nicky, little sweet Nicky-boy who’d wandered away that March afternoon and died an awful, dirty death when the ice on the Black let go beneath him. He’d always been a curious kid and that had been what finished him. Deke and his friends always played hockey out on the Black come winter when it froze up hard and gray, but Nicky was too little to be out there. But he’d gone anyway. Gone to show how grown up he was, only he’d never came back-

Sure, he came back, dumbass, don’t you remember? Those divers went down there and fished him out, found him floating just under the ice. Then they put him in that awful little suit and slid him in that box and then you got to see him, you got to see what your brother looked like when he finally…came…home…

Deke was breathing hard.

All that shit, it was hard. Even eighteen months later, that particular blade was still sharp and cutting and its edge was fine enough to slit his belly right open, to slice all those poorly-healed scabs off and start that poisoned blood running again. Deke thought for sure he’d never be able to squeeze out tears over his kid brother again, but, surprise-surprise, they were still there, stored up in that reservoir that never seemed to run dry. He could feel the pressure of those tears, how they needed to get out again, and he had to force them back and, God, it actually hurt to do that. But he was not about to break down in front of his girlfriend’s mother, of all things. He could see the look on Chrissy’s face now. What did you do today, Deke? she’d ask and he’d smile and say, You weren’t home, so I sat there and had a good fucking cry with your mom.

But all that aside, the pain was still real.

Not that he’d honestly doubted it, because he saw it every day in his mom and dad’s eyes, like they were bleeding inside, just withering away. They’d smile sometimes and now and then, they’d even laugh, but that laughter was forced and synthetic and almost scary-sounding when it came out. Rusty and creaking, the sound of machinery broken-down by neglect and operated by unpracticed hands. Not real, not right, just…agonizing somehow. As if it wasn’t laughter, but just screams from the pits of their souls masquerading as laughter. The loss of their youngest and the ensuing funeral had sucked them dry. They became depthless, cold wind-up toys that mimicked human beings, but that was about it. Being around them, you could almost hear them thinking things like, Nicky would have been in fourth grade this year or Nicky would have been turning nine this year or Nicky just loved Tony the Tiger…remember how he loved Tony the Tiger? or God, we still love you, too, Deke, but we’d trade you in an instant if we could have a weekend with Nicky.

Oh, yes, pain and pain and pain.

They lived it and so did he.

And now Chrissy’s mother was telling him about dead people coming back and it was just too much. Nicky…Nicky had been buried over in Hillside Cemetery, only there wasn’t such a place anymore. Nicky’s grave had been washed out with the others. And maybe his coffin was floating around River Town and maybe Nicky wasn’t dead anymore, maybe-

Lily said, “Are you okay, Deke?”

“Sure,” he managed. “Just fine.”

He excused himself and went upstairs.

He went into the bathroom and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps by that point. He looked in the mirror above the sink and did not care for his reflection. The way his eyes kept blinking or did not blink at all. The way his lips quivered and age had been etched into his young face. He did not look in the sink. He could not bear to. A hot, almost gaseous odor was coming from the drain.

Come down to us, Lily, come down in the darkness with us.

Christ, he’d come here to see Chrissy and now her crazy mother had opened up a can of something horrible in his head. Dead people down in the sewers. Nicky. Her dead sister calling to her from the drain. What kind of damaged shit was that?

Well, you helped her along that path to the nuthouse, now didn’t you?

He supposed he had. Lily talking about all those dead people living down there and what does he say? He tells her how, yeah, there’s plenty of room down there for a city. Dammit, what had he been thinking? But he knew he hadn’t been thinking at all. Just saying the first stupid thing that jumped into his head. Lily didn’t need to be hearing that, didn’t need to be encouraged to climb the walls and hide in the drapes. It was like some terribly depressed person talking suicide and him discussing the various razors available.

That was just not stupid, it was-

He looked down and something black bubbled from the drain.

It was like ink leaking from a pen. It formed a bubble that popped, then another, that black inky fluid seeping up from the foul-smelling drain. He could smell the sewers and the secret, dank arteries that flowed beneath the city. And something more, something fetid, something like rotten meat.

No, he wouldn’t deal with it.