Tim Curran - Resurrection

At which point, all the girls would scream bloody murder. Some of the girls would come away from these Friday night spook sessions scared out of their wits, many would have nightmares. But as much as the Sisters chastised old Dobby, he would not relent. Maybe the school was their’s, but the chapel, the choir, and the ghost stories were his and his alone. The girls needed a bit of wicked fun, he would say. A good scare does wonders to strengthen the heart. The sisters could never talk him out of this and Dobby scared the shit out of girls at Holy Covenant for upwards of sixty years and it was his talent for horror stories that filled the choir to bursting, not the love of singing hymns.

This is what Miriam was thinking about as she held court in her living room by candlelight. The night was dark and wet outside, filled with awful shapes that knocked on people’s doors…and inside, only slightly less spooky. For the candles flickered and the shadows jumped and Miriam almost felt like she was back in the chapel of Holy Covenant, could feel old Dobby sitting nearby.

“There’s danger out there, I’m saying, danger like none have ever seen before,” she told her captive audience of Margaret Boyne, her son Russel, and Lou Darin, the school superintendent. “It happened not an hour before you came. There I was minding my own business and there came a knock on the door. Oh, I knew it was trouble straight off. For who knocks on doors in the dead of effing night but the sort of things you would never want to invite in? It scared the flipping beejeesus right out of me. But did I answer that door? I did not. But I did go and look, God have mercy, but I did. I crept up there slick as a cat on a rat and peaked through the side panel window…and do you know what I saw?”

Russel just stared with wide eyes like a little boy on Halloween night and Margaret crossed herself, something she was doing a lot of this night. Lou Darin just sat there with his arms crossed, looking stubborn.

Miriam stroked the twelve-gauge shotgun on her lap. “Well, I’ll tell you. There was a man standing out there or what I thought was a man. But wet and dirty, stuck with leaves and clots of mud like he’d just crawled out of a ditch. He was all twisted up like maybe his back was broke, long hair falling over his face, things crawling on him. He stood there knocking. Very patient, in no hurry at all. Then he looked down and saw me and…I think he smiled at me, grinned, something. But it wasn’t a smile you expect to see this side of the grave and don’t you effing dare humor me with that smirk of yours, Lou Darin. For I saw it! It was a dead thing and that face hanging like rags…it was dead, a walking corpse.”

Lou Darin was still not convinced. First it was Mitch Barron and his Saturday night spook stories and now it was Miriam, of all people. Lou was willing to admit that there was some awful business out there, but the living dead? No, that was not reasonable or sane.

“We have some individuals out there driven mad,” he said. “Gangs of crazies looting and robbing and probably murdering. That’s all it is.”

“Well, Mr. Doubting Thomas, you are just the pick of the litter, aren’t you?” Miriam chuckled. But if there was any humor in her, you would not have known it. Her wrinkled old lady mouth was hooked into a permanent sneer like maybe she’d suffered a pinpoint stroke and couldn’t work the muscles loose. “You were with Russel and Margaret, weren’t you? You saw those children coming out of the water same as they did…how do you explain that?”

Lou Darin just shrugged. “Kids,” was all he would say.

But it was pretty hollow and they all knew it.

For Russel and Margaret’s version was a little different. They’d been coming out of the Boyne house when they saw those “kids” and Russel said they were both falling apart, the skin just hanging off of them. They were both carrying things that they were chewing on. Neither Russel or Margaret could say what the one thing was, but the other was certainly a dead cat.

“It was gnawing on the thing,” Russel reiterated. “It was squatting there in the street, all that water rushing around it. I think…I think it was a boy. It had ripped that cat’s belly clean open and it was stuffing its face in there, chewing. I saw it.”

“Of course you did, dear,” Miriam said. “The dead are walking, they’re climbing up out of their graves and they hate the living. They will murder us and make us like them. They will eat us and lick our bones.”

Lou Darin was very uncomfortable with all this. He thought himself quite reasonable. And reasonable people did not believe in ghosts and dead men walking. That was the realm of superstition and folktale. And those things were not part of who and what Lou Darin was.

“We just better stay here and wait this out,” Russel said. “When morning comes, we’ll be able to figure things out.”

“The sunlight will drive them back into their holes,” Margaret said.

“We can only hope, we can only hope,” Miriam told them, though she did not sound at all convinced. “This is the doing of those eggheads up to Fort Providence. Make no mistake about that. Genetic engineering and cloning and God only knows what. Maybe it’s that and maybe Hell has opened its gates.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lou Darin said.

“Is it, Mr. High and Mighty? Is it really? Are we back to that again, hmm? Well, then, since you’re so brave and rational, why don’t you go out there? The rest of us will stay here and rattle our gourds and conjure our spirits…you go out there and see for yourself.”

“I’m not about to go out there.”

“Any why not? There’s nothing to fear.”

They all looked over to the door that Miriam, ever resourceful, had secured with a couple boards laid across it and bracketed just like in an old-time frontier cabin. Course, she had to do that because she had blown the lock off with her shotgun. Nobody was mentioning that or the ugly black eye that Rita Zirblanski had given her. Better off to pretend otherwise.

“Well?” Miriam said. “Go ahead, Mr. Hot-Diggety-Dog.”

Lou was in a spot here and he knew it. You could only espouse theories so long before somebody wanted some proof, some evidence, and now they were expecting him to provide it.

“I’m not going out into the storm and catch my death while I wait for the zombies to show up,” he told them, trying to sound logical. “I’m a little too old for that nonsense and so are all of you.”

Which made Miriam chuckle. “Scared, eh? Well, rightly so, I’m thinking. There’s death out there and things walking that have been beyond the veil and have returned again. So it’s okay to cower with your yellow tail between your legs, Mr. Lou Darin. Nobody will slight you for common sense.”

Lou reddened, but could not bring himself to say anything.

“Listen to me,” Miriam said to one and all. “We can hope that day does come and hope that the National Guard will get us out, but we should be thinking also that those things might not happen. That what’s happened here might have gone beyond Witcham now.”

“Oh God…the whole Midwest?” Margaret said.

“Maybe the country,” her son added.

“Exactly.” Miriam nodded her head. “We’ll never know what sort of devilish horrors those eggheads were up to out at Providence. Opening doors that were meant to remain closed, letting things crawl through that should never have moved amongst men and women. But these things have happened before. The door of hell has opened a crack from time to time and we shouldn’t any of us be surprised.”

Lou Darin was having to clench his jaws shut not to say anything.

But Miriam saw him. “No matter, Mr. School Superintendent. No matter at all. For that door creaks open from time to time, only now those idiots have swung it wide. What I tell you now, my mother told me on her death-bed. During the First World War?which was just called the Great War before WWII showed up?over in East Genessee on Flank Street, there lived a tailor named Robert Hultz. He was a German immigrant and my mother grew up not three doors down the block from the Hultz tailor shop. Now, Hultz, seeing the devastation his own countrymen were causing Europe, sent his only son off to war. Conrad Hultz, my mother said, was a fine young man who tooled around on a motorcycle and was engaged to a pretty flower shop girl named Rose Kline. She promised to wait for him, but he never did come back. Poor Conrad died in France in 1918 during what they called the Battle of the Argonne. Back then, bodies were not returned to family and Conrad was buried on a French hillside with hundreds of others.