Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

Chick smiled at the strongman, who was hunched down over his knees, blinking at his feet and breathing heavily. “It will be dark inside,” the chicken boy said. “Let’s stay close together.” And with that he entered the black hole of the cave.

The others followed, single file, Durga just managing to squeeze through. The air inside was close and stale. The tunnel opened out almost at once, but as it did, the sound of their steps on the stone walkway beneath their feet echoed loudly. Bruno brought up the rear of their parade. The freaks had no torches, not even a kitchen match among them, so they proceeded by touch and sound. They could all feel the curve of the path they walked and its upward slant. They were spiraling, Bruno knew, up a slowly inclining ramp, toward the top of the castle.

Everyone lost his or her sense of time after a while. Random and unsettling noises came and went — growling of stomach, clearing of throat, and what might have been the skittering of vermin across the flagstones beneath their feet. At some point they heard a muted weeping or laughing, but when Milena attempted to shush Jeta, the skeleton denied the sound had come from her.

And before Milena could argue, Chick crashed, beak first, into something and the clan collided, one into the next, fronts into backs. The chicken boy brought up a hand and touched a smooth wood panel that angled down at him sharply from the ceiling of the cave. It was a hatch of some sort and it was freezing. He pulled his hand away at once and called for Bruno. The strongman had to get on his belly and crawl between Durga’s legs, then squeeze past all the others until he arrived at the front of the line, where Chick indicated the door.

Bruno ran his hand over it, searching for a latch or a knob, but the chicken boy already knew the effort was futile.

“You’ll have to break it down,” Chick whispered, just as the realization dawned on his friend.

The strongman had an even harder time with the hatch than he’d had with the boulder at the base of the mountain. He had to work against gravity, to thrust his body upward into the impasse. With all his strength, he rammed his good shoulder into the hatch, as hard as he could, a dozen times before growing frustrated and angry. He pounded on the door with his fist. Slapped at it and punched it and then, in the instant when pique turned into fury, he bashed it with his head.

The bolt snapped and the trap flew upward and suddenly the freaks were illuminated by a dim yellow light that shone from above.

Bruno was bleeding from his brow but he ignored the gash, silently got down on his knees, and hunched his torso over. Chick understood that the strongman was offering himself as a stepstool and began to direct the troupe, one at a time, to climb up the patriarch’s back and pull themselves into the turret. A single grunt issued from the Behemoth when Durga trod his spine. But Fatos and the twins pitched in to haul the fat lady to the top of the castle.

When Bruno used his remaining arm to pull himself up through the hatchway, he thought Chick was about to slide into Limbo. The boy was shivering and his eyes were locked in that unblinking daze. But, in fact, there was no seizure under way. Instead, the chicken boy was transfixed by the gaunt man, suspended from the dome ceiling of the turret by chains shackled to his wrists.

The man was dressed in simple black pants and a white peasant shirt. He was shoeless and his feet were dirty with dried blood. His skull drooped and rolled on his neck as if he were balanced on the edge of consciousness. His feet dangled just above Bruno’s head. His arms looked as if, in the next second, they might tear away from the body at the shoulders.

But Milena was already removing the lantern from a small table that sat behind the hanging man, shoving the table forward and motioning for Bruno to climb on top of it. Bruno wasn’t sure the table could support his weight, but he mounted it anyway, then proceeded to take hold of the chains that bound the prisoner.

The freaks stared while Bruno ripped the chains from the ceiling. The hanging man dropped to the ground at the chicken boy’s feet. Chick went down on one knee, lifted the man’s head in his hands. The man’s eyes fluttered, then closed, as his mouth opened and the tongue inside batted around for a moment until he swallowed and found his voice and managed to say, “I knew you would come.”

Without any difficulty, the man came up on his knees and embraced the chicken boy. Over Chick’s shoulder, he surveyed the whole clan and, in a louder voice, said, “I knew you would all come.”

And then things happened so quickly that Antoinette would not suspect the truth until hours later, when she heard the first shovels of sand being tossed atop her casket.

The hanging man transformed his embrace into something closer to a choke hold and called for his creatures, a horde of grotesque homunculi — half-naked gargoyles with red eyes and diminutive but overly muscular bodies — which emerged through the trapdoor and swarmed into the turret.

And in that instant, Chick knew that the Limbo had turned on him. And that the man they had just rescued could not be anyone but their dreaded enemy and pursuer, the demon at the heart of all of their nightmares, the mad Dr. Fliess.

Within seconds, Fliess’s creatures had filled the turret, thronged over and captured all of the freaks. Bruno threw and kicked and stomped a dozen or more of the monstrosities before Fliess called the strongman’s attention to the scalpel held at the chicken boy’s neck.

Bruno and Fliess stared at each other until the doctor said, “Surely even a strongman knows when to surrender.”

Antoinette was hysterical beneath a swarm of Fliess’s monsters, who had her pinned on the floor. One of them bent back the cone of her head, as if making ready to snap the neck. Seeing this, Bruno gave up the fight and the creatures battened onto his legs and arm. The deformed angel on the pinhead’s back moved its hands to cover her mouth and silence her.

“Very good,” Fliess said, lifting himself and Chick to standing and walking to the far side of the room to get a better look at the entire troupe.

“You are more hideous,” he said, “than even I could have imagined.” He hugged Chick more tightly, brought his mouth to the chicken boy’s ear and added, “And I have a vivid imagination.”

Behind the doctor, out the turret’s window, Milena could see a vast ocean that rolled beyond the far side of the castle. For only a moment, s/he wondered about her chances of crashing through the glass and diving to the water far below. But at the end of that moment, s/he knew the idea was simply life’s last kick in the ass. A final instance of false hope.

“It’s true,” the doctor said to the freaks, “that I will never understand fear in the manner, or to the degree, that you understand fear. And yet, it breaks my heart and it angers me that you’ve allowed fear to damn you.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Chick said, staring at the strongman.

The doctor shrugged awkwardly while maintaining his hold on the boy.

“Despite all appearances,” he said, “you’re human. And like all of us, you fear the unknown.”

“You don’t know anything about us,” Bruno said, in a voice that should have held rage but, instead, contained only the sound of terminal failure.

“That’s incorrect, Mr. Seboldt,” Fliess said. “Try to remember that nothing is as it seems. That’s the original good advice.”

Then the freaks were marched out of the turret’s proper exit and down a long series of stairs and dark landings that led, eventually, out of the front gate and down a steep and narrow stone stairwell cut into the cliff. They were brought out into a small circle of beach, a horseshoe cove of hard, brown sand. There were no hysterics when they saw the graves that had been dug during the low tide or the simple pine boxes that rested next to their tombs.