Tim Curran - Resurrection

So up he went, glad to be out of the water now.

The steps creaked and his entire body was so waterlogged it felt clumsy and heavy. There was a bad stink up here, one that he associated with shit and raw sewage, but also crawling things, profuse and many-legged.

But that didn’t stop him.

He found a corridor and a waiting room. The door was closed, but he could see wet footprints leading up to it and then he knew it had been these same footprints that he had followed out of the water and up to this door.

The smell was worse up here, just flyblown and rancid, a poisoned smell of corpses afloat in stagnant ponds. And this made Reed again ask himself what in the fuck he thought he was doing.

But then he heard the approach of squishing feet.

“Lucy?” he said. “Is that you, Lucy?”

“Yes,” a voice said and he thought for one moment that it sounded like wind blown through a reedy pipe, hollow and haunted.

The door opened and Lucy was standing there.

Reed went to her as she came to him, melted into his arms and it was then he saw that braided dark ponytail plastered to one bony shoulder with wetness and knew it was the floating dead woman. But he didn’t honestly care. He held onto her and she was cold as the guts of a dead fish and only marginally less slimy.

“Down below, down below,” she said in that voice of windy churchyards. “Down in the dark spaces, that’s where I’ll take you.”

Reed kissed her lips and they were frigid and waxy. Her bland white face was perforated with tiny holes as if something had been tunneling into her. Her flesh was not only cold, but gelid and wormy. As she pulled him closer against her, one of her breasts mashed flat and then popped like bubble in a spew of black fluid.

But by then, Reed did not care.

He let his Lucy take him to the window and then out of it, falling together into the surging dead sea of Bethany. He might have screamed once as they splashed down, his lungs quickly filling with rainwater. But that was it. Looping him in those boneless arms, she dove beneath the streets of Bethany, pulling Reed through those nighted tunnels and into the forever darkness of the rushing, cloistered underworld below where there was only silt and black water and decomposition.

All in all, Reed’s death was almost peaceful.

It was coming.

Night was coming.

Like some dead clock chiming just over the gray, fuming horizon, echoing with the sound of midnight down mahogany corridors, night was surely coming. And it was coming with menace and murk and malevolence, and what could you really do but fold up like a flower engulfed by night-frost or lay still like a corpse tucked away in a moonlight latticed box and just hope it would pass you by without stopping or lingering and reaching out for you?

Twilight hung decaying over the winding streets and glistening rooftops of that far northern country of Wisconsin. As the shadows congealed and lengthened, people suddenly evaporated from the rainy walks and stores were closed and doors bolted, shades pulled and prayers muttered through pursed lips. Maybe it was the flooding and the falling rain and maybe it was something far worse. For behind the walls of houses, things were being whispered about Bethany and River Town and the sort of pale, moon-faced things that waited in the flooded darkness.

Mitch Barron and Tommy Kastle went up and down Kneale Street, doing what they could and warning those that would listen. Most people wouldn’t even answer their doors and a lot houses were simply empty. The Boyne’s weren’t home, ditto for the Chambers and Proctons. There was a dog madly barking in the Brietenbach’s garage and that was about it.

Lily was home safe and sound-they’d looked in on her first-but there was something very off about her. Before she’d been edgy and morose, now she was too giddy, too happy, too excited. She was acting elusive and coy like some kid who was pretending not to know what her birthday present was or who had a secret they dared not tell. Whatever it was, it gave Mitch the creeps.

“You think they all just got out of town?” Tommy said after a time, standing there on the rain-swept sidewalk beneath an overhanging elm.

“I don’t know,” Mitch said. “I just don’t know.”

Because, honestly, he was hoping that was it, but in Witcham these days hope ran very dry even if everything else was soaking wet. He stood there a moment, remembering this neighborhood at high summer, the life, the activity. The sounds of kids playing and radios blaring from porches, the smell of charcoal smoke from barbecues and that summery green tang of freshly cut grass. He smiled briefly at the memory of that. Could almost feel the crisping heat of July, hear the sound of cards flapping in spokes, birds singing in the trees. But the smile faded to a ghost that drifted away when he saw the neighborhood now: wet and stinking and gradually flooding. All you could hear was water rushing in the streets, swirling and pooling, the inundated stormdrains still backing up and up as the world sprang a leak and Kneale Street sank. The sidewalks where Chrissy and her friends had drawn elaborate dream houses in chalk and roller-skated and skipped rope…they were covered in sluicing gray water and clumped, rotting leaves.

It was a cemetery now.

That’s what Mitch thought as he stood there. Kneale Street was a cemetery. Just a crumbling and graying monument to what was and what would probably never be again.

He shivered then, noticing that the shadows were spreading through yards, seeping from gutters and beneath sheds, roping around foundations. What sun remained was hidden behind that tightly woven gray tapestry of clouds, well behind the rooftops across the street.

The rain had diminished to a chill drizzle and Mitch looked over at Tommy and wondered what he was thinking as he stared down the street.

“I ever tell you, Mitch, how I put myself through trade school to get my welding and metalwork papers?”

Mitch shook his head. That’s when he was still in Milwaukee working a lathe for Empire Shipbuilding. “No, never did.”

Tommy lit a cigarette in his cupped hands. “I got me a job over in Bethany at Harvest Hill boneyard. You know the place?”

Mitch did. An old, hilly cemetery surrounded by high wrought iron gates. Place was huge. They’d buried his Uncle Lou out there years ago when Mitch was a kid. Place gave him the creeps with all those old stones, statuary, and crypts set into the hillsides. He always expected to see Vincent Price hanging around out there. Harvest Hill was older than the town that had sprung up around it, had graves dating back to before the turn of the 19^th century.

Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “Yeah, well that’s how I paid for my two years of higher education. See, Harvest was and is, a goddamned big place. They had like three full time caretakers and lots of college kids helping out with the lawns in the summer and the leaves in the fall. You finished cutting the grass, then you started again. And in the fall? Forget it. You could never keep the leaves out. Anyway, so they got this big ugly mortuary out back of the place stuck in this little woods out there. You could never see it from the cemetery unless it was fall and the trees dropped their leaves…”

Tommy said it was a high, gray concrete building, two story, with tall black windows covered by bars. Looked either like a Victorian insane asylum or Doc Frankenstein’s workshop. Nice manicured lawns and a circular cobblestone drive. Real old world sort of joint, but spooky.

“They used to store bodies there during cholera and typhus outbreaks, piled ‘em up like cordwood,” Tommy said. “The cellar is used as a morgue for people that die during the winter. They store them there for Harvest and a lot of other cemeteries that don’t have their own meatlockers. Out back now, in the rear of the building, you got these two high, dirty smokestacks like something they borrowed from Bergen-Belsen or Treblinka or one of those happy places. Yeah, they’ve got a crematory in the back and they cremate a lot of stiffs in there. At least, they did back then, but probably still do.” Tommy took another drag. “Well, I picked up extra money by cleaning the mortuary up three times a week-Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights.”