Tim Curran - Resurrection

Mitch grimaced. “Nice job.”

“Yeah, you bet. While the rest of you idiots were out chasing tail and getting drunk Friday night, there I was alone in that fucking spookhouse mopping the marble tiled floors and swabbing down the prep room, lucky bastard that I was. You know what a place like that is like at night?”

Mitch said he didn’t.

Tommy blew smoke out through his nostrils. “It’s just like you think a place like that is. So quiet it’ll curl the hairs at the back of your neck. You hear a timber creak or moth tap at the window, you almost shit your pants. Maybe some people get used to it, but I never did. Place always smelled old like a library, maybe with a sweet scent of wilting flowers and things beneath that smell you didn’t want to think about. And that crematory…don’t let anybody ever kid you, those places smell awful, like burning hair and singed meat and wet ashes. About make you want to puke.” Tommy laughed as if to dismiss it all, but you could see these memories did not sit easy with him. “But you know what’s really bad, Mitch? It’s the feel of the place. Not how it looks or smells, but how it feels. How it makes your guts curdle in your stomach and makes you imagine things that aren’t there. It’s cold in that mortuary in mid-summer and everything echoes. God. The place is dead and empty, yet you can’t get past the idea that you’re being watched all the time, that there’s somebody behind you or just out of sight that disappears whenever you look. I never got past that. Never.”

Mitch swallowed. “And why are you telling me this, Tommy?”

“Because this neighborhood is starting to feel just like that goddamn mortuary,” he said. “Like maybe the dead outnumber the living. I’m feeling something and it ain’t exactly good.”

Mitch lit a cigarette himself because his nerves were jangling and he had that same gnawing feeling in his belly that he’d had early in the day, the sense that something very terrible was waiting to pounce on him and the whole town. Problem was, he figured he now knew what that something was. Standing there with Tommy, he had that feeling of being watched, too, of eyes crawling along the nape of his neck. But from where? The trees? The sky? The hedges? You just could not put a finger on it.

Maybe it was just the emptiness needling him.

That could have been it.

There was just no one around. As if maybe the rumors of what was really going on were making the rounds, were being telegraphed mouth to ear until everyone knew the nature of what had Witcham in its grip. And such was its dire nature that doors were locked and curtains drawn, children dragged inside and knocks went unanswered. Looking around the neighborhood, there was a hush and a vacancy that you might associate with a desert ghost town. It looked very…desolate. Like one of those spooky, empty towns you saw on a 1950’s civil defense newsreel that was about to be hit with an A-bomb. It was doomsday on Kneale Street and everyone had filtered down into their bomb shelters to wait it out.

Cars were abandoned at the curb, bikes forgotten in yards, garage doors left banging in the wind.

“I had a cousin that was an undertaker,” Tommy said. “George, on my mother’s side. He said sometimes the stiffs would move because of the gas and what not. But I’m thinking they didn’t move like these ones do.”

“C’mon,” Mitch finally said, “let’s get this done.”

The next house down the way was Wanda Sepperly’s.

She was something of a legend in the neighborhood, Mitch knew. A cauldron stirring witch to the kids and a reader of palms and diviner of futures to many adults. Mitch didn’t go in for any of that business himself, but he knew for a fact that quite a few on Kneale Street did and many more from other parts of the city. He did not put much stock in fortune-tellers. He did not doubt that Wanda Sepperly practiced some form of folk medicine and was believed clairvoyant, because he had heard the stories just like anyone else. She could cure acne and impotency, she could touch your head with a switch of cherrywood and make your hair grow back and, it was also rumored, she could stop bleeding, both internal and external, by laying her hands upon the afflicted member. Fertility, it seemed, was something of a specialty of hers. She could examine a spider’s dewy web and tell you when to plant and by studying the phases of the moon, she could tell a woman the best nights to lay with her husband to bring forth seed.

Depending on who you listened to, these gifts, if they indeed existed, were either faith-healing or witchcraft.

Mitch didn’t put much into any of it, but he knew that Lily had been over there a few times…even if she would not admit as much.

All Mitch knew for sure about Wanda Sepperly was that she had lived on Kneale Street for the past twenty years in that trim yellow two story house with the gingerbread at the eaves and the sharp pitched roof with the serpent weather vane on top. That there was a tall white picket fence around her property that guarded her apple trees and pumpkin patch. That her vegetable and flower gardens grew lush and green and inexplicably verdant even in the driest and coldest years. And that her petunias and hollyhocks, bleeding hearts and wild roses were exceptionally healthy and vibrant and her tomatoes and carrots, sweet peas and snap beans produced a yield that was far out of proportion to the size of their plots. And all of this, it seemed, with no tending by Wanda herself. She had the green thumb, they said, but you would never see her putting it to use unless it was done by the light of the moon.

This is what Mitch knew.

He did not know about fortune-telling or any of that business. Only that Wanda was very old and that she had operated a farm in northern Price County for fifty-odd years and had managed to outlive a string of husbands. That when the last one was buried, Wanda had come to live in Witcham and nobody honestly knew why.

Tommy followed Mitch through the gate and up the walk. He went up the steps onto the porch and noticed that there were bundles of dried flowers suspended from the overhang. They gave off a sharp, unpleasant odor like a spice cupboard closed up for too long.

He knocked and the door swung in. It hadn’t even been latched.

“Mrs. Sepperly?” Mitch called out. “It’s just me, Mitch Barron, from down the block. Just wanted a quick word with you…Mrs. Sepperly?”

“Well, come on in then, don’t just stand there pissing water into my fine old carpet,” a voice said that was unnaturally hearty for the age of its owner. “I knew someone would come calling, Mitch, and it might as well be you.”

They found her in the living room, though it might have been called a sitting room as in years gone by, because there was not a TV, radio, or electric appliance to be had. Incense was burning in a clay pot and Wanda Sepperly sat in a recliner covered in flowery fabric. There were some old books on a shelf, some curios beneath those, a menagerie of framed black and white photos on the wall. Not much else but an ugly lime-green sofa that had seen better days. Mitch didn’t know what he was expecting, maybe a crystal ball or a few skulls or a stuffed monkey, but the room was simply comfortable and cozy with a few tapestries on the wall and thick plum-colored velour curtains.

Nice.

Wanda was dressed in a plain brown dress with a white ruffled collar that looked almost like something the Puritan ladies wore in Thanksgiving prints. She wore no jewelry and her white hair was very sparse, pink scalp showing through. Her eyes were bright, a vivid blue. She looked nothing like the senile old lady that whiled away afternoons on the porch rocker or collected dandelions in a basket…or, it was rumored, wandered her yard by moonlight tapping a stick on the ground.