Tim Curran - Resurrection

“Now all of this was bad enough on Mr. and Mrs. Hultz?she would die not three years later from an embolism and her husband would hang on another ten?but it was absolute and utter devastation for poor Rose. She rented an upstairs room from a family named Connor across the way. Well, Rose began to get a bit soft upstairs. People would run into her on the street and she would speak in great length of poor Conrad…as if he was still alive. Telling them about the fine picnic she and Conrad had had down at Millbury Park by the river or the plans for their wedding and honeymoon. A real effing tragedy, I’m thinking. Well, now here’s where things go from bad to worse. The Connor’s started becoming a bit concerned for Rose would sit up in that room of hers talking to people that were not there until all hours of the night and often just sit staring at a candle in her more lucid moments, wishing and wishing for her lost love to come back to her.

“Maybe she wished too godblasted hard for the Connors started telling the neighbors how they heard someone pacing up in the attic, saw a white face peering in through the windows, had found bouquets of dead flowers outside Rose’s room. Awful things like that. One night, well past midnight, there was a phone call at the Connor house. Mr. Connor worked for the railroad and was on call, so he was one of the few back then with a private line. Well, the phone rings and he answers it, thinking it’s the Chicago North-Western calling him in, but it’s not. Just a weird, windy sort of voice that he knew was Conrad’s, he claimed. It said to tell Rose that he was coming home. That the war was over. That was all. But enough to scare the Connor family half out of their wits. Well, it wasn’t long before people were no longer laughing off Mr. Connor’s story, for quite a few had seen a young, ghostly, quite pale man walking up the streets. One claimed that much of his head was missing, as was his left arm.

“And Rose? She carried on night after night, speaking with someone in her room and Mr. Connor had gone up there one night at wit’s end and he heard another voice answering her. Yes, the same voice from the phone. It sounded windy and distant, clogged up with something like somebody speaking through a mouth filled with blood. And the smell coming from under that door…flyblown and dirty. Well, it got so Rose had this nocturnal visitor just about every night. And that girl, who had yet to see twenty-one, had white streaks in her hair. She was completely mad. During the day, she would start at just about any noise and begin to panic when the sun went down. And how does this quaint little story end? With Rose screaming one night towards morning. They found her in there, ragged and bloody, her eyes wide and her mouth hooked into a scream. There was black dirt on her and graveworms as if something dead had lain atop her. And I’m guessing that something was Conrad Hultz who had finally bedded his fiance, something rotting and revolting and full of maggots with half its head shot off, something that made love to Rose and chewed on her as it did so.

“Well, a fine horror story, eh? I thought as much and I asked my Aunt Lydia about it. She looked like she was going to have a stroke. Her face went all gray and tight. It was true, she said, all of it. For Conrad had come back to claim his bride. Maybe all that wishing Rose had done by candlelight had kicked open the door of hell just wide enough for him to crawl through and, Lydia said, maybe it wasn’t Conrad at all, but just something pretending to be him. The sort of things that are out in the streets now. Who can say? Who can really say? But this much is true: The Connor’s moved out of that house and never came back. There were things they saw and things they heard which were even worse, local gossip had it. Nobody would live in that house after that. All sorts of wild tales about unwholesome smells and things whispering in the walls by night. An infestation of flies and worms that could not be put down.

“Anyway, one night, as a Halloween prank, my mother, Aunt Lydia, and a few other daring girls went up into that boarded-up old house some ten years after the Connor’s fled one dark night, leaving most of their possessions behind. They went up to Rose’s room to hold a seance as girls will. Lydia said it was a simply awful night of blowing leaves and howling black wind as Halloweens tend to be in this part of the country. A perfect night. Well, the girls were petrified, but they saw it through. They set up their candles and began calling up spirits. Did ghosts begin flitting about and knocking in the walls? No, nothing like that. But the room grew cold and dank as the grave and they heard sounds from the attic as the Connors had. And a smell of bad meat started rising up, a horrible smell that made you want to vomit, Lydia said. Rose’s old bed was still shoved in the corner and about then one of the girls screamed. For there was something on the bed, something covered in a graying old sheet, something that was breathing. Lydia said that’s when they ran. For whatever was under that sheet was trying to speak, except it sounded like its throat was full of dirt. And whatever was under there, it began to rise up, the sheet stuck to it. Lydia claimed that my mother was the last out of that room, that she looked back and saw something with a face like a spoiled, oily mushroom…just white and oozing. That as my mother ran out the door, a hand brushed the back of her neck and the fingers were wet and cold and pulpy like being caressed by a slime mold. Lydia said there was something like mucus on the back of my mother’s neck with little black spores growing in it. From that day on, my mother scrubbed her neck vigorously. I remember her doing so when we were children.

“So that’s my story, boys and girls, take it or leave it,” Miriam finished by saying. “But with what’s out in the streets, I’m thinking you just better effing take it.”

Russel and Margaret looked afraid, breathless.

Lou Darin just shook his head. “Nothing but a story. Dead people don’t come back and that’s that.”

Miriam looked like she was about to scold him like a foolish little boy that didn’t believe that fire would burn, but something stopped her.

There was a knocking at the door, a slow and heavy pounding.

The color drained from Miriam’s face. “All right, you cocksure sonofabitch, now’s your chance. You say the dead don’t walk…then go and answer that door. Do you hear me? Answer that effing door!”

The knocking came again.

Lou Darin did not move. He just looked like he was about to cry.

At the Styer Funeral Home, which was about seven blocks from Kneale Street over in Crandon, there was only the sound of the rain falling. Jason Styer?who had, eighteen months earlier embalmed Nicky Ericksen after he fell through the ice and supervised Nicky’s interment at Hillside Cemetery once the snows had melted and the ground thawed?was upstairs in his rooms above the funeral parlor. The power was out and there was little to do but listen to the rain against the windows and read by candlelight. Atmospheric, but impractical.

Styer had decided not to leave Crandon, at least until the waters rose a little higher. He was of the same mind as many others who thought the rain would just stop and all would be well. Besides, if and when they retreated, there would be a lot of work to do and Styer knew he would be busy. And rich. Because if a flood did nothing else, it produced a lot of bodies. Styer did not relish any of it. He wasn’t morbid nor unfeeling by nature, but business was business.

When he heard something below, in his place of business, he arched an eyebrow, but little else. The dead did not frighten him. As his father had said again and again, it was the living you had to worry about. So, with that in mind, he went back to his book.